Stepping Stones
by Marnie
Summary: The creators of the Ancient communication stones had never planned for this. (Because let's be honest, this fandom was in crying need of a Rush and Young bodyswap fic.) Co-authored with Seeking Idlewild
1. Chapter 1

There were a few unspoken but generally understood rules associated with Telford's visits to Destiny via the communication stones. First, nobody should remind Telford that Eli had hundreds of hours' worth of potential blackmail material - otherwise known as "documentary footage" - stored in Destiny's system and backed up on his laptop. There was no telling what scandals Telford could unleash back on Earth armed with information gleaned from even a small sampling of those kino recordings. Second, it was probably better not to mention the fact that the new medicinal herbs currently flourishing in the hydroponics lab, in additional to their usefulness as painkillers and muscle relaxants, produced an extremely pleasant state of euphoria when ingested or smoked. And it was definitely not necessary to inform him that a contingent of the science team had selflessly volunteered as human subjects to study the effects of the aforementioned herbs. Extensively. For science.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Greer, whether on or off duty, was to stay away from Telford unless Young was present to act as a buffer. Preferably, Greer and Telford would never come into contact at all. In fact, if an excuse had to be made to send Greer out onto the hull in a space suit for the duration of Telford's visit, that could and should be arranged.

In Greer's defense, he had done nothing new to provoke Telford since his first offense on Icarus Base. But the three years out of contact with Destiny's crew had not done anything to soften Telford's temperament or blur his memory of old grudges. If anything, in the months since Destiny's crew had awakened from stasis, Telford had managed to make more of a nuisance of himself than ever. From Greer's perspective, it seemed like Telford had given up any pretext of friendship with Young, and that he regarded Rush's every word and move with a degree of suspicion that went beyond even what Greer considered appropriate. As for the man's feelings about Greer, those were uncomplicated and obvious to anyone. Telford hated him, and Greer returned that sentiment in fucking _spades_.

So when Telford marched into the mess, wearing Young's body, accompanied by Rush's body with someone who certainly wasn't Rush in it, and Greer had not been told to clear out, he knew this was not something that had been run past the Colonel first.

Now, Greer didn't know what the hell Telford's problem was, other than the all too obvious fact that he was a dick. That was okay. He didn't need to know the ins and outs of it - that sort of thing was for Camile and her kind to figure out. All he needed to know was that the man was an enemy, and that it fell to Greer to protect the Colonel and by extension the rest of the ship from his inevitable machinations.

He put down the spoonful of mashed bitter-potato to free his hands, shifted his weight forwards, hoped the motion would be covered by the fact that everyone else in the room had also stopped, looked up.

Everyone knew Telford was trouble, but the top brass kept sending him anyway. All by themselves the fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. And Scott took him by the wrist and pulled. "Stand down, Sergeant."

"You know about this?" Greer asked, just in case it was legit after all. But the LT looked a little queasy himself. It was no surprise when he shook his head and the same certainty that nothing good was happening colored the wariness in his eyes.

"You let me deal with it. That's an order."

Pft. Right. But keeping a low profile until he found out what exactly was going down might work out best. He picked up his spoon again as Scott turned to Telford.

"Sir? Is there a problem?"

"No problem," Telford's smarmy smile looked even worse on Young's face than it did on his own. "Doctor Rush has been removed from the Icarus project and replaced with Doctor Rodney McKay, of whose outstanding work in the Pegasus Galaxy I'm sure you've all heard."

Oh. Oh well damn. Sliding along the bench to put himself in deeper shadow, choking down a cold splash of discomfort, Greer took a closer look at the person behind Telford. You'd asked him before this, he'd have said it would be satisfying to see Rush carry himself like the geek he was instead of the hard man he wanted to be. But there was something kind of pathetic about looking at the little guy now and seeing the nervous, open eagerness to be praised, the defensive twitches of a professional victim.

Rush was a wolf in ram's clothing, but this guy, this guy just looked like a particularly self-satisfied sheep. He gave an awkward wave of acknowledgement and then ducked out of the room. Embarrassed to be looked at? Or up to something?

"Did Colonel Young agree to that?" said Scott, asking the right questions in the right disbelieving tone of voice. Maybe he'd make something of that boy one day after all.

Telford shook his head, with a condescending blend of pity and contempt.. "The longer this goes on, the more you people forget you're in the Air Force at all. Colonel Young's agreement is immaterial…"

Which meant that Colonel Young had_ not_ agreed.

"And Colonel Young himself is being retained on Earth for the foreseeable future while an investigation into Rush's probity is carried out."

You see, he'd hoped he was wrong. Greer slid off the end of the bench and into the unlit patch where the moulding of the door blocked the dim floor lights. But he never was. And while he wouldn't want to wish away the Colonel's tendency to excessive forgiveness - he'd profited from it himself, after all - it certainly kept Greer busy. Someone had to step in and deal with the people on whom it was wasted, and Greer was not ashamed to be very good at that.

"So you're..?" Scott was keeping Telford's attention. Good man.

"I am in charge now, Lieutenant. I want you to set up a briefing in the gate room. Everyone on board to be there. I'll address them in half an hour."

_I don't think so._ Greer waited until Telford stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Scott for emphasis, and then he slipped around the pillar of the door and was out in the corridor, heading for the stones room, before Telford got it into his head again to sling him back in his cell.

* * *

"You can't _do_ that!"

Eli's voice reached him as he rounded the corner outside the stones room. The kid sounded scared and indignant the way he did when some serious shit was going down. Greer put on a burst of speed, skidded around the doorway and into the room. Found McKay there, bending over a laptop that was plugged into the stones console, and damn if that prissy look wasn't the worst thing Greer had ever seen on Rush's face.

He drew up by Eli's side, weight on the balls of his feet, not stopped, just paused. "What is he up to with that thing?"

Eli flashed him a 'thank God you're here' look. "He says he has orders to alter the stones protocol so the connection can't be broken. But I don't think that's what's happening. I don't even know _what_ he's doing."

"That's because you are a badly educated loser who wasted his life on games, while I am a genius who has been studying Ancient technology for a considerable number of years-"

Eli jutted his jaw and narrowed his eyes, but he spoke to Greer rather than to McKay, like he'd given up on making the other man see reason. "He _can't _know what he's doing because there isn't a manual. It's all guesswork. _Nobody_ knows for sure, certainly not enough to be fiddling around experimenting with them while a connection is in place. You remember Ginn and Amanda Perry being stuck in these things for weeks after their bodies were dead? Did anyone know that could happen, I don't think so!"

Greer remembered that just fine. Truth was the stones had always given him the creeps, and if Eli said McKay didn't know what he was doing, then McKay did not know what he was doing. He drew his gun and took aim at Rush/McKay's shoulder. "You stop whatever it is right now and back away. Stop it now, you hear me?"

"It's fine," McKay spread Rush's hands in a placatory gesture. "Look, I don't particularly want to do this either, but that's what I've been ordered to do. So…" He retreated as Greer advanced, his eyes fixed on the gun, his expression an unlikeable mix of fear and high-minded contempt, as though a threat to his life counted as a moral failing. Like he was disappointed by it. "Don't take it out on me. Because I'm just… I really see what Telford meant about a hostile working environment, now. I must say he rather understated the severity of the situation."

Greer took in the set up of computers around the stones console - a bunch of different colored wavy lines. Lots of math scrolling up the screen. It didn't mean jack to him. But there was an easy-enough way out. Get Young back, let him sort it.

He pulled his sleeve down over his fingers, reached out-

"No, don't do that-" McKay held out a warning hand, and curiously, behind him, Eli covered his mouth with alarm.

Greer pulled the first stone off the plate and tucked it back in its foam recess. Pulled the second.

"Oh, no, no, no," moaned Eli, lurching forward to check the monitors. "He was right in the middle of something. We don't know what kind of effect-"

McKay froze. Rush's eyes closed in the long blink of a change of consciousness as the way he held his body slowly shifted, gaining an impression of heaviness, gravitas. His shoulders slumped as though under a weight.

"Oh," Eli looked up from the computer screen with an exhalation of relief. "Oh, maybe we're all right after all. According to this, they're both back."

Which showed you what you got for relying on technology too much. Because Greer - Greer would have recognized that slouch anywhere. Well shit.

"Doctor Rush?" Eli asked, when Rush did not immediately spring like a jumping jack into action and blame.

Rush opened his eyes slowly, his face very still. He looked at his hands, turning them over as though he had never seen them before. Then he reached up to lay his right palm over the scruff of his beard.

"No," he said carefully, with the faintest intonation of humor. "It's Young. Sergeant, what the hell is going on?"


	2. Chapter 2

Unexpected body swaps were always disorienting, but as Young had just discovered, making an abrupt, unplanned transition from one borrowed body into another borrowed body was about ten times worse. His initial spike of nausea was thankfully ebbing away now, but the disorientation lingered. His mind, which had grown accustomed to donning new skins as necessary, had not been prepared for this particular set of circumstances. He wondered absently if Rush was handling it any better than he was, and then realized that he had no idea what body Rush was currently wearing. His? It seemed odd to hope that that was the case, but none of the alternatives sounded good.

Nothing about this situation sounded good, actually, and Greer hadn't even started talking yet.

"Telford announced a few minutes ago that McKay was going to take Rush's place here on Destiny," Greer began.

Oh did he, now? Well, that was certainly news to Young. Nothing like _that_ had come up while he was on earth, but to be fair, his meeting with General O'Neill had only just gotten past the preliminary stage when his consciousness had been so rudely yanked back to Destiny.

"So," Greer continued, "I come over here to see what McKay is up to, and I find him... tinkering.

He told Eli he was trying to make the connection between him and Rush permanent."

"And I said he had no _idea_ what he was doing, because no one actually knows anything about how the stones work or even what they _do_, exactly," Eli cut in. "And there's really no _telling _what could have happened, because-"

"Okay," Young interrupted, "I don't need a play-by-play, just tell me what brought me back to the wrong body."

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence during which Greer and Eli exchanged glances, and then Eli said, "Well, we don't know, exactly. That's what I was trying to-"

"I deactivated the stones," Greer said.

"Yeah, but that was just the trigger," Eli said. "It was whatever McKay did that caused this. I'm just… not real sure what that was." He grimaced.

Young glanced over at the box containing the communication stones. They were all present and accounted for, and he felt vaguely mocked by their orderly presentation.

"The thing is," Eli said in that sort of slow, reluctant tone that never boded well, "the stones really are inactive now, and according to the data I'm looking at, you should be in the correct body."

Young thought he had a pretty good idea of where this was going. "He wanted to make the transfer of two consciousnesses permanent," he said wearily. He could feel his neck beginning to tense up with strain. When he reached back to massage the tight muscles, he was momentarily disconcerted by the feel of Rush's fine, soft hair under his fingertips. The same hair that was sweeping across his cheekbones, giving him the unsettling sensation of tiny insects crawling across his skin. Why the hell didn't the man get a hair cut? Was it vanity or sheer indifference?

"Well, not exactly," Eli replied. "He just wanted to make the connection unbreakable. But I'm not seeing any connection at all, here." Eli tapped at the screen in front of him.

Young squinted at him, fighting to organize his thoughts through his mounting headache. "So…?"

Eli scratched his chin thoughtfully. "So this is just a guess, but I think the next time we drop out of FTL, you won't switch back," he said, and it was clear from his eager tone that his scientific curiosity was overcoming his sense of the calamity which had just taken place. "You'll stay in that body, because it's pretty much home base for you now."

Young glanced at Greer, who had up to that point been maintaining a neutral expression. But at this announcement, his face twisted in evident disgust. "Excuse me sir, but that is _fucked up_."

Yeah, Young wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of this becoming permanent, either. For one thing, he had just aged by six years, and that didn't seem quite fair, somehow. For another… well, there were scores of reasons why it would be inconvenient to wear this underweight, under-trained body forever.

But at least he wouldn't have to live with long hair forever, if it came to that. Young tried out one of the little head tosses that Rush seemed to perform unconsciously. As he suspected, it was only a temporary fix; the displaced hair slid right back into his face within seconds. He sighed.

"Are we certain that Rush is actually in _my_ body?" He asked, because that seemed like a vitally important fact to establish right about now.

"That's easy to find out, at least," Greer said, looking slightly relieved at the prospect of having something to do. Or perhaps he was feeling some twinges of guilt at the part he played in Young's current predicament. Young was going to have to figure out how to handle that later. Technically, Greer had disobeyed orders. But Young was grateful for his intervention, especially if the alternative had been that he and Rush had gotten stuck in the wrong bodies on Earth rather than on Destiny.

Young nodded at Greer, who turned and disappeared into the hallway. Young suspected he wouldn't have to go very far to find Rush, if it was in fact Rush in Young's body. Rush would be on his way to the stones room now, as eager to find out what the hell was going on as Young had been. How he would handle the news that his stay in Young's body was likely to be of extended duration, and possibly permanent, Young could only imagine.

"Whatever McKay did to those stones, you're going to figure out how to reverse it," he told Eli.

"Yeah, okay," Eli muttered, "I'll just start randomly experimenting on them too. I'm sure that won't have any horrific consequences. I mean, it turned out great for you guys, right?"

"Just _fix_ it," Young growled. Somehow, it just didn't have quite the same menacing effect in Rush's voice as it would have in his own.

In his free time - such as it was, these days - Rush enjoyed working on the particle/wave theory of calamity. If he posited that luck was a force along the same lines as electromagnetism, with the opposing poles of good luck and bad, then it must be possible to isolate its causes and predict its effects to some degree. For example, in his experience the military were a prime example of a negative luck generator. When he had arrived on Earth for what had been billed as "just a simple check up. It'll take five minutes," and found himself surrounded by frowning men with guns and no access to O'Neill at all it had been immediately apparent that this was already a kilo-fiasco if not worse.

Since - contrary to the action of magnetism - bad luck attracted more bad luck, he couldn't say he was exactly surprised when, just as he was gearing up for a fight on earth, he found himself yanked from one body to another, opening his eyes to find everyone in the ship gathered below him in the gate room, glaring at him with hostile expressions. Someone had fucked up. Someone had fucked up as they were wont to do as soon as his back was turned, and now it would be up to him to put it right.

"I don't know what you lot are staring at," he said. "I didn't call you here."

His voice! It came from low in his abdomen. He could feel it rattling round his chest and throat like little stones. He didn't recognize it at first because he hadn't heard it from the inside before, but the sound and the feel of it prompted him to look down. Black boots, black trousers, the name "Young" embroidered on his shirt. He flexed his hands, feeling the stiffness of a broken finger, badly healed and aching.

Well now. Wasn't this a turn up for the books.

"Colonel Young?" A couple of steps down from him, Scott gave him a complicated look. Probably of hope.

He wondered if he should say 'yes.' But his experience with the Lucian Alliance proved that just being in the right vessel was not enough to convince. Humans were remarkably adept at spotting the consciousness inside it. Which made for an interesting existential question, but… not right now.

"That would be convenient," he said, dismissing the muttering crowd from his notice, turning to go. "And so not true."

"_Doctor Rush_?"

It was hardly rocket science, was it? He and Young had been sent to Earth, if it wasn't Young who had returned, who else could it have been? Honestly you'd have hoped Scott might have reached that conclusion five minutes ago and gone on to something of actual value.

Adjusting for the body's different centre of gravity and weight, he walked out of the room, and when he felt confident began to jog in the direction of the stones.

Scott caught up with him. "Doctor Rush, where are you going?"

And good God he didn't have time for this. "You are an officer of the United States Air Force, yes? So that means you must have had at least some kind of formal education. How about you try exercising your doubtless remarkable powers of observation and deduction to answer that question yourself?"

Infuriatingly, Scott gave him a sympathetic look and pressed the air down with his hands as though he was pressing down the barrel of an invisible shotgun. "Look, I can see you're upset, but-"

'Upset?' He wasn't 'upset.' It was simply clear that something untoward was going on, probably involving Telford. Telford could not be pried off the stones, had undoubtedly swapped with Young and immediately assembled the whole crew for an announcement. That had the flavour of what had been done to them during that first disastrous dial-home attempt. Telford had the clout to arrange for Rush to be held on Earth while someone else handled the scientific side of the affair.

One had to admire how the man learned from his mistakes. Rush had foiled him before, so this time he had been careful to replace Rush too.

God, anger felt solid in this body, supple and volcanic and sweet. He tasted it with pleasure and then let it go, careful not to be distracted. So far so typical. But then something had happened with the stones. Part of Telford's plan? It didn't seem likely.

Belatedly, he remembered Scott. Oh yes, he'd been having a conversation. "I'll give you a clue, shall I? There has clearly been a mix-up with the communication stones, so…"

"We're going to the stones room."

He made a gesture intended to convey the sentiment _there you are!_ _See what you can do when you exert yourself._ Didn't feel he carried it off with quite his usual panache in this more clumsy form.

Scott grimaced for some reason. "You couldn't have just said that?"

_I shouldn't have had to._

Greer skidded into view, running full tilt. Rush rolled his eyes to find himself flanked by the two of them. The Bill and Ben of Destiny, just what he needed.

"Sergeant Greer. Let me guess. There's been a malfunction on the stones. Young and I have returned to the wrong bodies and you've been sent to find me. So you can omit that part and tell me everything else. What has been happening here?"

Greer exchanged an _oh, it's Rush alright_ look with Scott. "Some fucked up stuff, man. Let's get you all in the same room before we talk."

Which was efficient enough a suggestion that he complied.

The sight of… himself brought him to a halt in the doorway with a bark of laughter. He'd seen himself from the outside before, of course, during that incident when there had been two of him, and that had been disconcerting enough. But this, with his body and Young's mannerisms - what a mongrel creature it was.

Rush was taller than Young now. Only an inch or two, but what a difference it made, literally looking down on the man. He hadn't tested this body out to discover the limits of its strength, but he - oh, he had experiences enough to take an accurate guess, and this was glorious. The boot was literally on the other foot, and Young must be asking himself, at this very moment, what would happen if Rush took the opportunity for revenge.

He got close because he could, because it was fun to force Young to look up to meet his gaze. But he wasn't a savage - he didn't take it any further than that.

Young's mild, ironic smile looked unimpressed. Rush recognized the expression as one that meant _I know what you're doing and it won't work_. But Rush had inside information and he knew it would. It was a constant of human nature that no one liked being loomed over - that no one who was loomed over felt it without a certain twist of apprehension, of low, primal fear.

In that respect, Young had a lot of poetic justice due.

"I hear there's been another cock-up in my absence." Out of habit, Rush reached back to dig the heel of his hand into his aching neck muscles, only to realize that his ever present headache - so continual he had learned to disregard it entirely - had disappeared. His neck was fine too.

Had he really thought this was bad luck? On the contrary, it was delightful.

"Here's the situation as I understand it," said Young, attempting to hook Rush's hair back behind his ears. "Telford came on board with McKay. He told Scott and Greer that McKay was to replace you on Destiny permanently…"

_He did what?_ Rush's amusement dived headfirst into liquid nitrogen. McKay? That lascivious buffoon? McKay who'd had the nerve to criticize his equations to all and sundry on Langara and then fail, utterly fail to make any kind of connection at all? McKay on _his_ Destiny? Over his dead body.

Young was still talking. What was he saying?

"...investigations into your 'probity'. As a result, Telford was going to replace me for the duration of the hearings."

It was a fucking witch-hunt, that was what it was. Oh, they'd leave him alone to toil away in obscurity on some godforsaken little planetoid with the rest of their rejects, as long as he wasn't in any danger of actually succeeding. But now he'd found something good, something valuable of his own, they wanted to take it away. Of course they did. They always did. He should have known it from the start.

If he had been in his own body, he would be shaking now. He knew the texture of his own anger intimately, the fine tremor under the skin, the stir of hairs along the back of his neck and the heartbeat fluttering at the back of his tongue. The need to move itching down his limbs like spiders in the bone marrow. But this came out of silence, rising up out of darkness, sleek, full, burning like a bubble of lava, and it was so extraordinary, so all consuming that his mind recoiled from it as if scalded.

Wait one moment. He attempted to take a mental step back from this body and gather himself. The experience of the stones had never been like this before, never been quite so immediate, so visceral. But then he had been, as it were, remote piloting his host. Now, he was embedded, and it seemed the equipment ran its own subroutines when he wasn't looking. That might prove to be a problem.

Taking a deep breath, he unclenched his hands from around the table edge and attempted to think, still scattered, unsettled by the intimacy of his own physical reactions.

"I'm not going to let that happen, Rush."

Perched on the edge of the table where the stones sat smug in their box, Young managed to do a good impression of his usual stolidly reassuring tone, even using Rush's tenor voice. There was a moment, just a moment, when Rush wildly dared to believe it - remembered being tumbled out of a glass prison and into hope. He remembered reluctant confessions that had lead to astonishing alliances. With a choking ache that hurt too much to examine closely, he remembered that he had asked for help once, and Young had given it.

That had been a fluke though. It did not do to expect that kind of thing on a regular basis. Rush had learned very early in life not to set himself up for that kind of disappointment.

"And how exactly do you propose to stop it?"

Young shrugged, and it was odd to see his own limbs move so slow, as if they were moving through clear water… and he was dropping that metaphor right now.

"First we get this stones problem sorted out so you and I can go back to our own bodies." Young turned his head to give Eli a pointed look, half admonishing, half encouraging. So very _him_ that Rush wanted to charge him rent for using Rush's poor innocent face like that.

"Then I send someone back to Earth, tell them that you stay and that's non-negotiable." Young shook his head, looked like he regretted it when it made his hair swing forward and into his eyes. He grimaced. "The brass want McKay on board, he can come on board _as well_ - I got a dozen civilians who'd be happy to exchange with him full time. But they don't get to take you off unless you decide for yourself that's what you want."

Or to summarize - Young's plan was to get the stones working again and then hope he could change his superiors' minds by pleading with them. Pathetic and unworkable. Re-open their access to the ship, and they would send someone - O'Neill himself perhaps - whom none of the military would dare disobey. Then Rush would be forced at gun-point back to Earth to stand some kind of jumped up trial, and his work would be taken away.

Rush needed to be rational about this. He needed it especially now that his hands were shaking and he wanted to hit something with this body just because he could. He needed to be calm. In control. No one believed in the mission like he did, no one cared with the single minded passion it needed. It was up to Rush and Rush alone to make sure he got to keep this one thing. It had always been up to Rush alone.

He nodded slowly, as though he were considering Young's reassurance with the seriousness it deserved. His thoughts felt faintly slurred, sluggish, and his mood grim, but that was hardly surprising. Turning to Eli, who stood by his open laptop regarding both of them with a wide-eyed look, sympathetic and yet fascinated, he asked, "I assume you recorded what happened during the transfer?"

"Duh. Of course I did. But like I was telling the Colonel, the stones are inactive right now. This…" Eli held out both palms as if offering Rush to himself, "Is pretty much you. And while I don't want to be quoted on this, I'm thinking a system reset could solve everything else and give us contact with Earth again."

Which would be the worst of all worlds and could not be allowed.

"No, no, no, that would be much too dangerous," Rush's mind finally spun up to speed, he swung back into action with a feeling of relief. There had been a moment there when he was afraid his cognitive capacity had been affected.

"We don't know what the results might be of being hosted in someone else's body on a permanent basis. The pressure of a strange consciousness forcing the brain to rewire to adapt itself to profoundly new ways of thought? It could lead to psychosis, brain damage, stroke…" He shook his head, rather pleased with the spur of the moment rationalization. It sounded genuine enough to convince."We'll do as the Colonel suggests. Fix this problem first. Then worry about Earth."

Step One: get the military out of the room. That ought to be easy now they had been assured of prompt obedience, though perversely enough, Young did not look convinced. That long level stare of his was more hawk than lion, from Rush's eyes, but disconcerting nonetheless.

It gave him a twinge of cold under the heart to be suspected again after these last few months of trust, but he… he couldn't afford to think about that right now. "Show me your data, Eli. Gentlemen, this may take some time. We'll be sure to tell you when we have something worth reporting."

They didn't go immediately of course, because that would have been useful. Young lingered awkwardly, like he was trying to think of something to say. And if he didn't go soon, Rush would have to think about the way he kept sliding his hands through Rush's hair - and that was just a token of the way he must be gradually getting to know what being Rush felt like, just as Rush was gradually learning what it was to be him.

He didn't want to think about that either. He turned his back on the three of them, bent over the computer, caught the reflection of his face in the screen and shut his eyes for a heartbeat before he could waver.

Behind him Young sighed. Footsteps heralded the military's departure. Step One achieved.

Step Two: prevent Telford and McKay from ever coming back, and prevent himself from ever being forced to leave, by disabling the stones permanently. If that meant stranding him in a younger, stronger body, so be it, he could live with that.

He might never be able to look at this face again without thinking about what he had done to Young… But it wasn't as though _he_ had done it. No need to be melodramatic. McKay and Greer had done it between them. Rush was as much a victim here as Young was. He must not lose sight of that fact.

Step Three: make sure nobody found out about Step Two.

In a moment of irresolution, he thought about the bridge, Eli's expression of utter betrayal, the anger that had pulsed from the whole crew, pervading the ship, in which he had had to breathe, eat and sleep for weeks afterwards. They would not take to this well either, being permanently cut off from their loved ones, being finally utterly on their own.

But it might focus their minds at last on what was important - on the mission. He could sell the mission to them as the only way of ever returning. It was high time that umbilical cord to Earth was cut and people began to accept that this was their home now. He was doing them a favour, really.

"Let's run a systems check on the base, and then on each stone individually." That would take seven hours, more than enough time for Eli to grow bored and wander off. At which point he could take out a few vital expressions from the code and the job would be done.

"So, 'probity' huh?" Eli gave him a friendly sideways grin. "Who do you reckon ratted on you to merit that one?"

The only one he could rule out was Young. For all his faults, Young was not the kind of man to sneak around behind anyone's back. He favored the straightforward, headlong attack. Rush appreciated that. Other than Young? "I don't know, Eli. It could have been anyone."

"Yeah, you've not really been flavor of the month for the past five years."

Rush laughed, startled by the growl of it. That was true enough. He was really rather surprised he hadn't yet been lynched. Hence the vital importance of Step Three.


	3. Chapter 3

Walking in a borrowed body had never required any conscious thought before now. Young had just set one foot in front of the other, same as always, and any necessary adjustments for differences in height, weight, and build seemed to happen automatically. This was a little different. He found himself having to curb a restless urge to cover ground rapidly in long, purposeful strides instead of moving at his usual deliberate pace. This awkward tussle between conscious intention and physical instinct was entirely new and more than a little unsettling.

By the time he had rounded the corner into the hallway that led to his quarters, he was beginning to feel like he had reached a workable compromise between Rush's quick, light gait and his own more ponderous tread. He hoped the result didn't make him look ridiculous, but that was probably unavoidable regardless.

It appeared that having his consciousness planted in Rush's body had not imparted to him any of Rush's lithe grace - that effortless fluidity of movement that Young had often noticed and even appreciated for its aesthetic appeal. He had a feeling he could adapt over time - this body _wanted_ to move according to its usual habits, and it was only the intrusion of his displaced mind that kept it from doing so - but that was hardly the goal here. Rush was right. This was something new, something the creators of the communication stones had clearly never intended, and there was no telling what the long-term physical and psychological impact of taking up permanent residence in an unfamiliar brain and body would be.

The thought of Rush brought with it a vague sense of discomfort. Young had left the stones room reluctantly, and there was still some nagging part of him that wanted to turn around and go straight back. He told himself that there was nothing he could do to help, that he was needed elsewhere, and yet there had been something in Rush's eyes - or rather, in Young's own eyes, turned unusually sharp and calculating-

Young's train of thought was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Camile from an intersecting hallway. She shot him a shrewd look, head tilted, and then offered him a smile that was equal parts weariness and cynical amusement. "Colonel Young, I presume?"

Young sighed inwardly, reluctantly abandoning his plan to spend the next fifteen minutes on his couch, staring at a wall, processing what had just happened to him. Just fifteen minutes to quietly panic and then pull himself back together, that was all he had wanted. But no. Life on Destiny didn't pause just because the commander had just gotten stranded in the wrong body and was facing what promised to be one hell of a fight with Homeworld Command over the future of his chief scientist. Time to suck it up, pretend that he was not experiencing a chaotic internal tug-of-war between his consciousness and his host body, and start addressing the other problems that faced him.

"Camile," he replied, attempting to return her smile. He had a feeling it came across as something closer to a grimace, but it was the best he could do at the moment. In addition to all his other sources of discomfort, the ache in his neck and the pounding in his head had only increased since he had first become aware of them. "I suppose you must have been present for Telford's announcement, then?"

"Oh yes," Camile said ruefully, "we were all there for that, _and_ for Rush's sudden appearance in your body. There's a bit of an uproar over it all. It's been an eventful day, and there haven't even been any aliens involved."

"We don't need aliens," Young muttered. "We make our own fun around here." He started moving toward his quarters and Camile fell into step beside him.

"What went wrong with the stones?" she asked predictably.

Young reached back to rub at the base of his neck, trying to soothe painfully stiff muscles. "McKay did something to them while trying to make the connection between himself and Rush permanent. Eli-"

"Permanent?" Camile interrupted, halting mid-stride. She turned on him with an expression that was both startled and, to his interest and approval, deeply troubled. "I wondered what Telford meant when he said Rush was being replaced with McKay. I couldn't figure out how they were going to manage it, although I should have guessed. But to force Rush to live out the rest of his life in someone else's body… that's such an extreme violation of personal autonomy that I can't even begin to wrap my head around it. Is it even possible?"

Young shrugged. The motion sent little bolts of agony through his neck and into his skull. _Jesus._ Was this normal for Rush, or did it have something to do with the malfunction of the stones? He might have to see TJ about this if he was going to be stuck in Rush's body for any length of time.

"I don't know, but apparently Telford thought so," he said, trying to maintain a neutral expression through the spike of pain. Judging by the mildly confused look Camile was giving him, it wasn't very convincing. "McKay didn't have time to complete his work. Greer found out what he was doing and broke the connection. Which, all things considered, I'm grateful for. But as you can see, Rush and I got kind of… switched in the process."

Which brought to mind the very interesting question of whether Telford and McKay had returned to the correct bodies on their end. Young entertained himself for several moments with the idea of Telford trapped in McKay's soft, undisciplined body before he dismissed it. Not his problem.

Camile started walking again, more slowly this time, and he followed. She shot him another searching look, and this time there was a hint of concern in her eyes. "Can't you and Rush use the stones to change back?"

"Rush and Eli are working on that right now."

Camile hummed and nodded. "And… how are you?"

Young gave a weak laugh that sounded even more pathetic in Rush's softer, higher voice than it would have in his own. "Honestly, I'm a bit traumatized, and I've got a real bear of a headache," he admitted.

They had reached his quarters by this point, so he slapped the door control and ushered her into the room ahead of him. "I really need to ask you a favor, Camile," he said, trying to keep his delivery matter-of-fact rather than desperate. He wasn't sure how well he succeeded. "Several, in fact."

Camile crossed her arms loosely in front of her and settled herself on the back of his couch. He dropped onto his bed facing her. They regarded each other speculatively for a few moments.

"I think I can guess one of them, at least," Camile said finally. "You're hoping I can get the IOA involved on Rush's behalf. They probably have the best chance of getting Homeworld Command to reverse the decision to remove Rush."

He nodded.

Camile looked off to one side, apparently considering it. Her thoughts played over her face in a series of small tells - a slight frown, pursed lips, a twitch at the corner of her mouth. Then she met his eyes again. "I can try."

"I know he's not exactly a favorite with the IOA-" Young began.

Camile snorted at the understatement.

"-or with you, for that matter."

"That's hardly the point, I think," she said. Her tone, while calm, was tinged with a low, smoldering kind of anger that Young could readily identify with. "We're talking about forcing someone, against his will, to relinquish control over his own body. Stargate Command spent the better part of a decade fighting an alien race that made a habit of doing just that."

It was a good angle to start with, but Young wasn't sure he found it entirely convincing. "Well, to play devil's advocate here," he pointed out, "the Goa'uld took control of bodies still occupied by their original owners. Homeworld Command will make the argument that they're offering Rush a perfectly functional body in exchange for his."

Camile raised an eyebrow at him. "And how's that working out for you, Colonel?"

He bared his teeth in a humorless grin.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," she said quietly. "It's not _his_ body, so it's not an equal exchange. And when you take into account the dangers of living on this ship, it becomes even more problematic. If two people were permanently connected and then one of them died, wouldn't the other die as well?"

Young absently brushed Rush's hair out of his eyes (it immediately slid right back into place, goddamnit) and rubbed the back of his neck. "Presumably," he said, considering the point.

"How do you rate McKay's chances of survival against the threats we face out here compared to Rush's?"

"I don't know McKay well enough to judge, although the man is a bit of a legend," Young said. "But Rush is about the hardest son of a bitch to kill that I've ever met."

He chose to ignore the pointed look Camile was giving him, one that clearly said _and you'd know, wouldn't you?_ "At any rate," she said aloud, "Rush's life would forever be at the mercy of McKay's choices, and it's unconscionable to subject him to the dangers inherent in that kind of connection against his will."

"There's something else that worries me," Young said, and then hesitated. Camile looked at him expectantly, but he let the silence expand and thicken the air between them before he finally broke it. "I wouldn't expect this to weigh with the IOA or Homeworld Command, but for us, at least, it should be a real concern."

"You're worried about how this would impact Rush psychologically," Camile guessed.

"I _know_ how it would impact him," Young said quietly, meeting her eyes steadily from under a curtain of unruly, grizzled hair. "It would break him. Destiny and the mission, that is what he has. That is what he lives, eats, and breathes. I don't know what he would do if he lost them forever, but I know what _I_ would do if I lost my last shred of hope, Camile, and it terrifies me."

Camile shifted her weight slightly and stared back at him meditatively. Then her lips quirked into a strange little smile. "You care about him," she said, and her tone was a complicated blend of surprise, doubt, and curiosity.

Possibly. Definitely. Definitely, in that Young didn't want Rush to end up killing himself out of spite because everything he had ever cared about had been ripped away. Definitely, in that Young had trouble imagining life on Destiny without that infuriating, irascible genius swaggering up and down the halls like he owned the ship and was sharing it with the rest of the crew out of the benevolence of his twisted little heart. Definitely, in that Rush had become so intertwined with Young's perception of Destiny's mission that he had trouble untangling the two concepts in his mind. But none of that had any bearing on this conversation. At all.

"I care about every member of this crew," Young said, dropping his eyes. For the first time, he was glad to have Rush's hair to give him a little bit of privacy while he collected his thoughts. Maybe _that_ was why Rush kept it long. "And he's definitely been acting more like a real member of the crew recently. I know we've had our differences in the past, but things are getting better. _Much_ better. So I'm certainly not going to abandon him to what, for him, would be a fate worse than death."

"But as you said," Camile said quietly, "that isn't likely to influence either the IOA or Homeworld Command in their decisions."

"Right," said Young, rising to his feet. He began to pace back and forth across the center of the room, unconsciously giving in to the restless energy that belonged to this body and not to himself. "So we lead with the ethical argument, and then sell them on Rush's credentials, his level of dedication to this mission, and the contributions he's made since arriving on Destiny. No one knows this ship like he does, no one has spent as much time going through Destiny's database as he has, no one wants this like he does. And now that he's working in partnership with the rest of the science team, _and_ with you and me-"

"You can't tell me that you really trust him completely," Camile interjected. "He still could be keeping any number of secrets from us and we wouldn't know."

"Eli would know," Young said.

Camile tilted her head to one side and offered him a faint smile. He didn't know if that meant she put less faith in Eli's ability to detect Rush's machinations than he did, or that she simply found his confidence in the boy endearing. It could go either way, really.

Young sighed and came to a halt in front of Camile. She looked up at him thoughtfully, brows lifted in an unspoken question.

"This is not just about protecting Rush," he said, allowing conviction to color his tone. He liked the effect it had in Rush's voice, so flexible as it was, so capable of conveying emotion. It did lose a bit with Young's flat American delivery, but that didn't matter. He had Camile's attention. "I truly believe that Rush's place is here, on this ship. This is where he belongs. And I might not always trust him, but I trust in his vision."

"That's a good line," Camile said. "Maybe I'll use it."

"Maybe don't include the part where I still don't necessarily trust him."

"No," Camile agreed, "but that part about believing in his vision. I like that. That will play well with the IOA, I think."

"Good," he said, smiling as he began to feel marginally more hopeful. This would be an uphill battle, but at least he had Camile in his camp.

Camile's expression lightened in response to his smile, and there was an unmistakable twinkle of humor in her eyes. Laughing inwardly at whatever he was doing to Rush's face at the moment, he suspected.

"This is weird, isn't it?" he asked.

Camile laughed outright at that, and he felt momentarily warmed by the clear, bright sound of it.

"Creepy, even?" he prodded.

Camile shook her head. "Rush in your body, _that's _creepy," she said. "You in his? It's actually kind of cute." Her smile turned vaguely apologetic.

He blinked at her. No one had called him _cute_ since he was five years old. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about it.

"Slightly pathetic," she added, "but cute."

"Oh, thanks," he grumbled. He pushed his hair out of his eyes - _again_ - and tried to tuck it behind his ears, but it was much too fine and slippery to stay where he put it. Nothing at all like his own coarse, wiry curls. A thought occurred to him. "Camile, you don't happen to have a pair of scissors, do you?"

Camile's eyes sharpened at the question, and she stretched out a hand as if to ward him off. "Oh no," she said. "I refuse to be an accomplice to any crimes committed against Rush's hair. Especially not while he's in _your_ body."

Ah. Well, there was _that_. Young thought of a looming presence encroaching on his personal space. He thought of the nervous flutter of his pulse, the stiffening of the muscles in his back, the narrowed focus of his vision. He thought of the instinctive internal shrinking of prey facing a known and formidable predator. And most of all, he thought of gazing up into his own face and seeing satisfaction radiating from the foreign presence behind his own eyes.

He understood what Camile meant. Probably better than she did.

"You think he'd be mad, then?" he said, brushing the unsettling memory aside. Rush had just been enjoying himself. Making a point. There was no reason to suppose that there would be a repetition of that little performance.

Camile shrugged. "He might not care at all. But if someone borrowed my body and cut off my hair, I'd toss them out an airlock." She softened the threat with a smile, but the fact that she had made it at all showed how far she had come since she had arrived on Destiny. The old Camile had not casually joked about murder. It went to show what living under the constant threat of calamity did to a person.

"Well, I guess we won't do that, then." he sighed, abandoning the idea with reluctance. He massaged his neck again, desperately willing the spasming muscles to relax.

"Colonel," Camile said after a pause, "you don't look like you're doing well."

He really wasn't. The excess energy that had sustained him up to this point seemed to have finally dissipated. He felt achy and weary and overwhelmed, struck once again with the magnitude of what had taken place and the uncertainty over whether it could be fixed. He walked back to the bed and dropped onto it, rubbing at his face with both hands. But the sensation of Rush's scruff against his palms was an unpleasant reminder of dark days when Young had given up on his own personal grooming in the depths of his depression, so he let his hands fall into his lap. "It's… a bit of an adjustment," he said.

"I imagine so. You said there was more than one favor?" Camile reminded him.

"Yeah," he murmured. "Can you tell everyone what happened to me and Rush? And let them know that Rush is _not _going to be replaced?"

"I can do that."

He nodded his thanks. "Now I need to talk to Scott. Fill him in on how we're going to tackle this Rush issue."

"I can do that, too," Camile offered. "Honestly, you look like you need a nap."

Young huffed out a bitter laugh. "I need a lot of things right now, Camile."

She smiled sympathetically and rose to her feet. "I'm serious. I'll talk to Lieutenant Scott and pass the word around to the rest of the crew. And I'll be on standby to meet with the IOA whenever the stones are fixed. In the meantime, try not to torment yourself over all of this, okay? I know how you are."

_Try not to torment yourself._ That was a bit like telling him, _try not to breathe_. He could make the attempt, but it would probably only last for about thirty or forty seconds before he gave up. But he nodded anyway, grateful to have her assistance, and grateful for the period of solitude she was offering him. Maybe he _would_ take that nap. He felt like he hadn't slept in days. Knowing Rush, it was quite possible that he hadn't.

He let Camile to show herself out. Once she was gone, he pushed himself to his feet and went to stand in front of the tarnished mirror that he used for shaving. A stranger looked back at him from the glass. It wasn't him, but it wasn't really Rush either.

Young deliberately relaxed his face, letting all expression bleed away until even the ghost of his consciousness flickered out like a snuffed candle behind Rush's dark gaze. There. Now it was Rush staring back at him. Rush, with bones like blades and eyes like windows on a starless void, his fifty-two years recorded in lines and furrows across a canvas of tanned skin.

"We're going to put this right," Young whispered to the man in the mirror. "All of it. I promise."


	4. Chapter 4

_They find him on the edge of the playground where the ground dips into a shallow trench and shrubs provide cover from prying eyes. For nearly a week it's been his quiet refuge, but he knew he couldn't stay hidden here for long. They always find him eventually. And then come the taunts, the threats, the clumsy hands pawing at his satchel or snatching his books from his grasp. If he gives in he'll never see his books again, and he'll take a beating either way. It's better to fight back, to get hit, to protect what belongs to him._

_Tom finds him first. It's always Tom who leads the pack. He's the biggest, and also the stupidest. He wouldn't know maths from the profane scribbles on the walls of the boys' toilets, but he knows how to throw a punch. Three other boys trail behind him, but their names aren't important. They're just the scavengers, waiting for a fresh kill. They'll hang back, wait until he's beaten, and then they'll swoop in and make themselves feel strong by kicking him while he's down._

_His pulse quickens and his stomach lurches, but he stares defiantly up at his bigger classmate. He never cowers on principle, and he's learned not to run. Burdened by his heavy bag, with its weakened seams and broken strap, he can't rely on his one advantage - speed - to save him. And he isn't about to leave his books behind. They are all he has. They are who he is. They are more important than a few black eyes and split lips ever could be. So he stands his ground and adopts a scornful expression to mask the fluttering fear inside._

_The first blow comes as a surprise, unheralded by the usual barrage of unimaginative insults. He staggers back, cheek smarting, stars bursting before his eyes. Already he can taste the metallic tang of blood on his tongue. The next strike comes before he has time to regroup or counterattack. It slams into his gut, stealing his breath and making him gag. He's going to be sick. He's going to be sick at the feet of this useless, brainless piece of garbage, and he's never going to forget the indignity of this moment. _

_He bends over, retching, and a well-timed shove sends him sprawling into the dirt. That's when Tom's friends appear, circling like vultures. The ensuing rain of fists and feet is relentless, pummeling him into the ground where he fell. His fingers claw at the earth beneath him as he tries to gain leverage to roll away, to escape. It's never been this brutal before. Never so overwhelming, nor so humiliating. And never before has he felt panic squeeze his throat like this, strangling his vocal cords until he cannot release the cries of rage and pain that echo within his mind._

_By the time the boys tire of their pastime and leave him shaking on the ground, he is certain of only one thing. This _cannot _continue. Whatever it takes, regardless of the cost, he must ensure that he will never be this vulnerable again. Tom and his friends are strong, but he is clever. He can't beat them at their own game, but perhaps he can change the rules. _

_It's his only option._

He came awake with a wounded cry, hands fisting in the bed sheets and body curling protectively inward. Phantom pain and borrowed fear made him shake uncontrollably, and for a few moments he couldn't figure out where he was or even who he was. All he knew was the dream, and the outrage and helplessness and shame that came with it. Not just a dream: a memory. An old, ugly little episode in the life of one Doctor Nicholas Rush that he would rather tuck away forever in some dark crevice of his psyche and never examine again.

As he grew more aware of his surroundings, his trembling eased and his mind quieted. He was lying on his bed in his quarters on Destiny. He was safe. He was-

"Colonel Young?" Eli's voice crackled from the radio on the bedside table.

He was Colonel Everett Young. _Fuck_. He was _not_ the little boy who had been beaten up repeatedly in school. He had _never_ been that kid who was too smart to be popular, too smugly superior to be tolerated. And no matter what body he currently occupied, he was definitely _not_ Destiny's resident chief scientist. But for a little while there, he had genuinely been confused on that point.

Greer was right. All of this was _fucked up_.

"Um, Colonel Young? Come in, please," Eli said a little more insistently.

Young rolled toward the end table and made a grab for the radio without bothering to sit up. He misjudged the distance, sending some unknown object flying off the table. It hit the floor with a resounding clatter. Great. He didn't have the energy to find out what it was and whether it had survived the impact, so he decided that he could probably live without it.

"Go ahead, Eli," Young said after his second attempt to retrieve the radio proved more successful.

"You're needed in the stones room," Eli said. When Young didn't answer immediately, he added, "Um, right now would be good."

Young suppressed a sigh. "I'm on my way," he said.

Oh well. He hadn't been enjoying that nap anyway.

It wasn't that Eli was a suspicious kind of person. In fact his mom was always shaking her head at him, telling him to stop letting people take advantage. For example, she'd say it when he'd spent three days fixing a friend's computer and missed a job interview. But she'd usually have this lurking warmth in the back of her eyes, and more often than not she made him cookies after, which lead him to believe she didn't really mind, she just didn't want him to be hurt by the hardness and ingratitude of the world.

So yeah, it wasn't like he was paranoid or anything. It was just that over the past five hours, while he watched the stones run their self-diagnostics and tried to figure out as much as possible about how they worked from the code, Rush had gotten progressively more and more antsy.

That was weird, because Rush was always telling him to apply himself - always with the little digs when Eli did something for play instead of for work. You'd have thought he'd be pleased that Eli was excited enough by the mind-bending fusion of human consciousness and targeted quantum entanglement to give up the chance of dinner and a nap to work straight through.

Another thing that was weird? Watching Rush be antsy in Young's body. All the striding about and the drumming of fingers and the crumpling up of little notes and throwing them in corners, it all seemed a tad more threatening with the extra power behind it. Watching Young's face in fluid expressiveness - frowning, chewing at his lip, pulling to one side with Rush's half smile? That was… going beyond weird and into just plain wrong, to be honest.

Eli slowed on the way to the mess, as his suspicions pulled at him like spider webs. Rush had said "Eli, you must be starving. Why don't you go and get some food. You can bring me some while you're at it."

He'd gone more or less automatically, because it was Young's voice that said it, and it was a Young kind of thing to say. But now his brain was catching up with his stomach, and his brain was saying "Really? Are you really going to fall for that again after what happened with Franklin? What if he's just trying to get you out of the room? What if he's going to… I don't know… do some horrible kind of self-experimentation that leaves them both stranded in the body of the next passing alien? I mean it's happened before..."

And yes, it wasn't like Eli was a suspicious kind of person, but he wasn't _stupid_ either. Once bitten, twice shy, right? He turned around and hurried back.

A glimmer of blue light where none should be stopped him from simply bursting into the room unannounced. What the..? He eased into the corner of the door jamb to get a better look. One of Destiny's holographic screens hung just above the table on which Eli's own laptop was displaying the firmware of the stones.

Destiny could do that? He felt a spike of curiosity seasoned with glee - because having a virtual console _anywhere_ you wanted would be _so_ useful - but tasting mostly of disappointment. It would have been nice to be told.

But this was Rush, who hoarded information like a dragon hoarded gold. Eli shouldn't be too...

While his conscious mind had been going through this little dance of anger and resignation, his subconscious had been noticing the Ancient numbers and words glowing in the air like frantic fireflies. It red flagged them to him, pulling his attention away from the existence of the screen to notice what was written on it.

He read in silence for what seemed like hours, everything in him growing heavy - his leaden lungs pulling down through his chest to puncture his empty stomach.

He walked in. "Is that a manual?"

Rush jumped, which would have been funny in that body, but... wasn't, right now. "I didn't see you, Eli," he said, covering his black dead heart with his hand. "Yes, I thought there must be one, so I set a search going for it. It returned an answer moments ago."

And yeah, yeah, Eli would have bought that four years ago, before any number of things, but he knew that tone of voice now, that easy, habitual reaching for a plausible excuse. Oh, it made him mad. How many times did Rush think he could do that and not have absolutely everyone catch on?

"That's…" This never got any easier, this standing up against authority thing. Conflict, it just wasn't for him. He had to wind himself up until he was shaking to burst out. "That's not true, is it? How long? How long have you known about this and just not told me? I mean, I was running my mouth at Greer and Young about how nobody knows how these things work and you were _right there_ listening, and you didn't think to say anything? You didn't think that was something we all needed to know?"

"Eli, Eli," Rush backed away, raising his hands defensively, and smiling the _lets just keep these secrets between us, shall we_ smile with which he had confessed to being a homing beacon for Chloe's aliens. "Yes, all right. I knew there must be a manual when Andrew Covel made the connection between himself and Greer unbreakable. As a scientist, he's adequate I suppose, but he could never have come up with a fix like that on his own. You'd have realized it for yourself if you'd only thought about it. And yes, perhaps I was remiss in not sharing that with you at once but-"

Apparently Eli'd been subconsciously thinking about this for the whole aborted walk down to the mess because here came another suspicion, newly minted and shiny. "So if you knew how to fix these things all along, why did you need to get me out of the room?"

He made a lunge for his laptop, but Rush was faster, getting there first, hitting Enter and then shutting down the lid. Trembling with fury and adrenaline Eli snatched it from under the man's hands, powered it on again. It took forever, and when it came back there was nothing, just an empty interface, the command gone, processed. Completed.

"What did you _do_?"

He couldn't cope with this. Seriously, he couldn't fucking cope with this... No, no. No, calm down. A man who could fly Destiny through a death star could surely manage to deal with Rush for five minutes. And besides, he ran a back up every ten seconds. He could go and damn well see for himself what Rush had done.

"Nothing bad, Eli," Rush laughed the _goodness, don't be so paranoid_ laugh of the falsely accused. "I just ran the detangling program I wrote. The next time we use the stones, Young and I should return to the right bodies."

Eli loaded up his backup and sure enough, there it was - a little program. It took him a while. Two minutes according to the time stamps, but it felt longer, to read and understand the section of the manual that still glowed accusingly between them, to understand that the program replaced phrases in the stones code, at random, with similar-looking but non-functioning junk.

No record existed of what had been done, only that it had been done. That the entirety of the working code of the stones had been corrupted. Wrecked as thoroughly as if they'd been smashed into smithereens with a hammer.

Eli's mind connected the dots long before his heart caught up. There was a pause like that between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder, in which he registered Rush pressing his back into the far wall, hugging himself with Young's arms, the fingers of Young's hand pressed to his lips.

"Eli," Rush began, tentatively, "It's for the best. Believe me…"

He was meant to be visiting his mom in two days. Eli reached for his radio, called for Colonel Young, his voice strained with the effort of not screaming.

"Don't…" Rush said, turning away with a grimace when he went right ahead, because at this moment he didn't honestly care if Colonel Young dumped Rush out an airlock. His mom was expecting him in two days, and she... she hadn't been doing well over the past three years of not knowing if he was ever coming back, and he couldn't, he couldn't do that to her. She'd think he was dead. Oh God, she'd be sure he was dead and she would... He couldn't...

Running feet in the corridor outside heralded Young's arrival. He padded in, quiet as the eye of a storm. "Eli?"

"Don't…" Rush implored Eli.

"Rush broke the stones."

Rush sighed, and Young went very still beside Eli in a way that - even now that Young was slight and fragile-looking - sent a thrill of fear through him. Shouty Young was never the problem. This one, though, whose zero degree kelvin fury was indistinguishable from calm, this one Eli was glad was not his enemy.

"He did _what_?"


	5. Chapter 5

The boy was such a toady. You'd have thought such a plump, bright boy would know better about whose side nature had designed him to be on. Rush tried to gather himself, wished he had not retreated to the far wall, from which it was an awkward dash, avoiding chairs, to get to the door.

All right. All right then. So the secret was out. Now he had to... But he couldn't think what to do. Trying to think with this fucking brain was like trying to run in quicksand. He had to fight for every fucking foot fall and he was so…

He wasn't scared, all right? Well, if he was, who could blame him? He could taste dust at the back of his throat, and behind his eyes he could see again the desolate beauty of a world on which he was the only living thing. Young had left him there. Young had had them sedate him and prod about with hooks by his beating heart. Young had suffocated him to death while Camile and Scott looked on, and no one, not one fucking person on this whole fucking ship had intervened. The conclusion was inescapable - Rush was disposable. Young could kill him whenever he liked, and no one would do a thing to stop it.

"Eli," Young said, his face angled slightly towards the boy but his eyes fixed on Rush's. "Calm down. This can still be fixed."

"I'm telling you, it can't!" Eli looked like he was going to cry, hyperventilating like a child. "I mean do you have any idea of the size of this program? If I... if I was to go through every single line trying to work out which bits were good and which bits were convincing looking nonsense, it would take me _years_. Like ten years at least. And I wouldn't be able to catch all of them in the first pass. No one would." He grimaced, its comic effect dashed by the desperation in his eyes. "Which would mean another pass of another ten years. And she's going to be dead by then, my mom. In twenty years time we're not going to have anything left to reconnect for."

"Okay," Young said, in the flat voice of a man who was done.

Rush eyed the exits again, caught sight of his own hands as he did so - square, strong hands. Oh. Oh, but that put rather a different complexion on things. Fear transmuted habitually into anger in this body, so he let it come - a clear, righteous possession of anger he could taste between his teeth like the blood of a rare steak. He was afraid, and the thing that was frightening him? He was going to tear that thing apart and beat it into the fucking dirt.

Young gathered up the stones and their base, put them back in the box, his movements very precise. He pushed the box into Eli's chest, the boy grabbing it with the hand that wasn't cradling his laptop. "No one's asking you to do this alone, Eli. Take the stones, find the science team, figure out a way of putting it right. If he can break it, you can put it back together. You got this, Eli. Okay?"

Eli clutched the case to him like a comforter, his head bent as he sucked in air, trying to calm down. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. "Okay." He shuffled to the door, turned, biting his lip as though he was reluctant to let the words out. "What about you guys?"

Rush wondered whether - lily livered as it was - that was an intervention, whether he needed to feel sorry for the lad, or grateful to him, or more likely annoyed that he thought it was necessary at all. Did none of them remember Simeon? Rush was perfectly capable of looking after himself. All the more so now he had Young's power at his disposal.

Sometimes, for all the man's obvious inadequacies, it felt like Young was the only one on board who knew what he was capable of, the only one who respected him at all.

"We're just gonna have a talk."

"I can see that," Eli smiled nervously. "Just... don't get carried away. You know how you are. Don't forget you're _Rush_ now, okay?"

Oh, the boy was worried about _Young?_ Rush had to grin. How very delightful, how good it felt on this side of the bargain - to be feared instead of pitied.

Eli left the door open behind him, but Young closed it, stood there very still - parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, looking at Rush with cold eyes. There wasn't a trace of fear or cowering in him, and Rush was glad. He wouldn't have liked to see his own body do that, and maybe - if he was being honest with himself - he wouldn't have liked to see Young cringe either.

"You want to tell me what the hell you were thinking?"

No. No, he didn't. He didn't want to have to appeal to Young's sympathy, to explain what it was like to know, down to the copper taste of the blood at the back of your throat, what it was to be prey. To know that if you didn't help yourself, they would take every last thing from you and leave you puking up your guts in the dirt. Not because they even valued that thing, but just to show that they could.

It wasn't as though this brain didn't get there eventually, it just took its own sweet time. "The moment the stones were working again, they would have replaced you with Telford," he offered, pushing the chairs under the table, clearing the path. "And Telford has almost killed everyone on board this ship _twice_ now. How long do you think the crew would last with him in charge and no one to hold him back? He'd blow up the ship and everyone on it within weeks of arriving. I couldn't risk..."

That was true, oddly enough. Sometimes Rush didn't know himself what drove him. Maybe part of his abhorrence for the thought of Telford and McKay in place of himself and Young really had been altruism. He was capable of it. Maybe he really had...?

"Right. Yeah. You did it for all of us. Selfless of you, Rush."

Rush passed the table, came out into the empty space between it and the door. Young had not moved away from the wall. He was watching Rush's progress with the thin, cold smile Rush remembered from being murdered the first time. They were going to fight. He could feel it like a charge through his blood and he wanted it, he just didn't quite know how to make it start.

"Well, yes I suppose I've something of a stake in our survival but-"

"What happened to 'no more lies?'"

Oh, oh of course it was _personal_ for Young - it was the personal betrayal that bothered him most. Everything had to be _personal_ for him.

Mysteriously, people seemed to respond to that - Young had Scott and Greer, James and TJ, Eli, lately even Varro orbiting him. Held there because they wanted his approval, wanted his love, and, when he had it, he took it for granted. That was not, not ever, going to happen to Rush. Rush was the only fully rational creature on this ship and he did not give in to anything as fucking crude, as laughably _animal_ as pack dynamics. Love and trust and all that shite. It was all fucking hormones and he would have no truck with it.

Young closed the distance between them, poked Rush in the chest with a spindly finger, leaving a jabbing little bruise. "You gave me your word, Rush."

He'd been waiting for the trigger to be pulled and there it was. The words slammed into him like bullets, shocking him, filling him with outrage. Bullseye. Young shouldn't have gone for that, where it was already tender. That had bloody well hurt. Fuck him anyway and his fucking self-righteousness. He deserved whatever he got.

Rush balled his fist, swung hard, his knuckles connecting solidly with Young's jaw, snapping the man's head back, lifting him off his feet and hurling him backwards to stagger against the wall. Wow. That was a trip and a half. That felt _good._ He'd maybe wanted to do that for a very, very long time.

Young hauled himself upright again, hands flat against Destiny's slick metal, his lips outlined in crimson. He turned his head slightly to spit blood on the deck but did not look away from Rush's face. It occurred to Rush that perhaps he should have pressed his advantage, he just wasn't used to being the attacker, he didn't know how it was supposed to go.

Something shifted in Young's expression and his stance, as though he was recalibrating. The emotion drained from behind his eyes. They'd been fighting like old enemies, like people who cared about each other's opinions, like people who got angry with each other because they _mattered_. Now that was gone and Young was looking at him like he was a target.

This was what it felt like, was it, when Young stopped being personal? Rush... Rush didn't actually like it very much.

He moved in, instinctively wanting to smack that expression off Young's face, to jolt the man into acknowledging him again, into _caring_ like he damn well should.

The punch had worked like a charm, so he threw another, going for the nose this time. Before it connected Young ducked under the blow. While Rush was still struggling to pull the punch back before he broke his hand against the wall, Young grabbed him by the uniformed shoulders, and - tucking himself into a half crouch - unbalanced Rush, rolled him over his bent back and threw him to the floor.

Rush had the sense to hold his head up, so it was his shoulders and his spine that took the impact of the fall, both of which were a great deal more padded in this body than they were in his own. Only his pride was really hurt, his sense of justice. This was not fair! What about his chance to get his own back? Wasn't he at least owed that?

Part of him, an analytical part he was glad could not be shut up even at times like this, noted that Young was now fighting like James, compensating for the loss of his strength with better technique, and it hadn't really occurred to Rush until now that this wasn't just the graceless brawling of streetcorner thugs. It was a skill, and Young had studied it.

He rolled to his side, had only managed to get up on hands and knees when Young was on him again - a kick to the side of the head and another to the belly. His ear burning and shrieking, scuff marks of his own bloody boot on his cheek, he managed to catch Young's ankle on the second kick, twist it clockwise. Young had no choice but to go with it.

Young fell, but as he did he kicked out again, forcing Rush's awkwardly angled arm to bend backwards at the elbow. The pain was excruciating. Rush let go immediately, scrambled to his feet, trying to back off, holding his arm protectively against his chest with the other hand cradling the joint.

"All right, all right," he gasped, fucking afraid again, and that just wasn't fair. He was going to be killed and he would lose his work that way, just because he'd tried to keep it. If those bastards at Homeworld Command hadn't tried to take it from him in the first place he would never have had to resort to any of this. If they'd just let him alone... "You've made your point. Let's... talk about this."

"Oh now you wanna talk?" Young grabbed him by the biceps, kneed him in the groin and, as he doubled over at the sickening pain, Young drove the top of his head up under Rush's jaw, clacking his teeth together, snapping his head back, stopping his breath. He tumbled into darkness knowing he would never find his answers, never claw his way back. So much for the quest for immortality. Step Three had not gone well at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Young stood over Rush's unconscious form and waited to feel the bitter, hollow ache that always filled him in the aftermath of his rage, but it didn't come. Instead, he merely felt subdued and a little shaky. The unfamiliar anger that had manifested as a buzzing along his spine and a crackle of energy across his skin had dissipated entirely. He was tired and bruised, and he could still taste blood from the cut on the inside of his cheek, but his mind was quiet.

The fight had been a revelation. Despite his own extensive training, Young had expected the advantage to be with Rush. But Rush's reaction time had been uncharacteristically sluggish. In fact, from Young's perspective, Rush had almost seemed to be moving in slow motion. Young, on the hand, had never been so quick on his feet. He had had no muscle memory to rely on, but the rapidity of his thoughts had more than compensated for that handicap. He had been able to assess and to strategize on the fly, absorbing information and converting it to action so quickly that it felt more like reflex than conscious movement. It had been desperate. It had been exhilarating. It had been just a little bit like flying.

Now that it was over, Young was no longer quite sure how to feel. He only knew that he felt unlike himself. And maybe it was better not to examine his emotions too closely right now. This numbness in the wake of exertion was rather nice. In fact, he hadn't realized quite how overactive his borrowed brain had been until this moment, when it finally took a breather.

He stepped away from Rush, grunting softly as he put weight on his ankle. That was going to be sore for a few days, and so would his jaw where Rush had caught him with that ill-advised punch. But other than those minor hurts and a slight worsening of his headache, Young had emerged from the fight relatively unscathed. He was certainly feeling better than Rush was going to when the bastard woke up.

Young made his way slowly to the table and pulled out a chair. It might be petty of him, but he wanted to have the height advantage for the impending conversation. He dropped into the chair with a soft sigh, threaded his fingers through his hair, and stared grimly at Rush. At Rush in _his_ body. At Rush crumpled against the wall in _his_ body. Jesus, this was a mess.

He didn't want to think about Eli's face as he babbled about his mother, panic and grief and anger all mingling together in his voice and turning it shrieky. He didn't want to think of the same scenario playing out over and over again, the same heartbreak written over the faces of every member of his crew. He didn't want to think of the collective despair that would inevitably turn to fury and hate. The last mutiny had been nothing to what Young was facing now, and as for Rush? Well, his life expectancy could probably be measured in days if the science team couldn't undo what he had done.

"You know, you're really fucking stupid for such a smart guy," Young muttered. He braced his elbows on his knees and propped his chin in his hands, gazing at the still figure across from him. His hair slipped into his eyes, but he didn't brush it away. The sensation of soft, feathery strands brushing against his face was beginning to feel almost normal.

"I wish I knew what you were thinking sometimes," he continued in a low voice. "I can't make sense of it. I thought we were in this together. 'Side by side, for the benefit of everyone.' Those were your words, Rush. Your words. And I was really starting to believe them."

The worst thing about all of this was how much it actually hurt. Now that his post-combat apathy was fading, Young couldn't help focusing on all the pretty-sounding promises that Rush had so casually ground into the deck plating under his boots. It went deeper than the anger, this sense of betrayal. It revealed how much Young had valued their fragile, fledgeling trust, and how much he had wanted it to flourish into a strong partnership. Well, he should have known better than to give into the soft, sweet lure of hope, especially where Rush was concerned. Disappointment had been inevitable.

A groan issued from the source of Young's current problems, and he sighed. It was time for another one of their fun little chats, in which Rush would justify his actions by throwing all the blame back on Young, and Young would have to grit his teeth and count to ten and resist the urge to throttle him.

Rush groaned again and curled into himself. Still feeling that knee to the groin, no doubt. Then he twitched, drew in a sharp breath, and opened his eyes, staring directly at Young. Young returned his gaze calmly. Rush blinked rapidly, brows drawn together in a look of such profound confusion that Young almost wanted to laugh at the sight. He was sure his face had never been half so expressive throughout the entire course of his life before Rush got a hold of it.

At first, Young attributed Rush's apparent shock to the fact that he had lost their fight. But when something resembling wonder joined the confusion in Rush's eyes, Young had to reevaluate that assumption. It dawned on him suddenly that Rush wasn't surprised that Young had beaten him. He was surprised that Young hadn't _killed_ him.

_Oh, for fuck's sake_.

If Rush still couldn't trust Young not to fucking _murder_ him at a moment's notice, then it wasn't all that surprising that he didn't trust Young in smaller matters, either. Young knew the blame for that was all on him, but _goddamnit_, would they never get past this? Would the dust of that barren world where he had left Rush cling to them forever?

Young stared into Rush's eyes, thinking of alien planets and primary school bullies, and felt something give within his chest. God, but Rush looked pathetic right now. And it was so much worse this time, because Rush was wearing Young's face, and Young hated to see that poignant mingling of pain, fear, uncertainty, and awe spread across his own features. So it was in a surprisingly gentle tone that Young finally asked, "What were you thinking, Rush?"

Rush blinked again. He struggled up into something closer to a sitting position, his back to the wall and his limbs folded awkwardly inward. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest, as if he might unravel if he let go. "I told you," he murmured. "I couldn't risk Telford-"

"Telford could only have taken my place if I had used the stones, genius," Young interrupted him. He kept his tone as light and reasonable as he could manage, but some of his frustration managed to creep in. "I was planning to send a proxy to sort things out, make sure that you got a fair hearing. Anyone coming through from Earth would have had an armed guard to make sure they didn't try to mess with the stones again. We could have handled it Rush. I _told_ you I would handle it."

Rush's brow knitted in confusion again. He squinted at Young as if not quite sure he was really seeing him. "Proxy?"

"Camile," Young said. "She was going to get the IOA to back you. It might surprise you to know that she's bristling with righteous indignation on your behalf."

"You don't say." Rush sounded unconvinced.

"It's true. Although I expect all that indignation to find a new target when she finds out about this."

Rush winced. "I had no choice. Even if Telford hadn't replaced you, would you have disobeyed a direct order if, for example, General O'Neill had used the stones to demand your compliance?"

Young shook his head, then absently carded his fingers through his hair. Rush's eyes followed the motion curiously. "General O'Neill is not an unreasonable man, Rush. I doubt any of this was his idea. So yeah, I'd welcome the opportunity to talk to him about it. I'd love to hear his comments on the practice of forcibly ripping people from their own bodies over nebulous concerns about their 'probity.' Fuck, Rush. If that becomes a regular thing, everyone on this ship is liable to be exiled from their bodies at a moment's notice. We're none of us saints."

Rush's mouth quirked to one side in a brief acknowledgement of the truth of that statement. "So now what?" he asked softly.

"Now you undo whatever it was you did to those stones."

Rush shook his head. "Can't be done, I'm afraid. My program replaced the code at random. There's no untangling it."

"You'd better hope that's not true," Young said, finally allowing his voice to take on a harder edge, "or life on this ship is going to get pretty unpleasant for you pretty damn fast."

Rush looked like he knew it. He seemed to shrink still further into himself, and his expression went blank, as if he had turned his gaze inward. Was he remembering the taste of bile on his tongue and the dirt under his fingernails and the seemingly endless rain of blows on every exposed inch of his body? And was he already concocting some new scheme to undermine the bullies in his life?

"Rush," Young said softly. Rush twitched and shot him a complicated look that Young couldn't decipher. He seemed suddenly more alert, and Young could practically see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Not a good sign. "It could already be common knowledge, you know. Eli can be discreet when necessary, but he was pretty worked up when he left. The rest of the science team know, at any rate."

"Yes, but it doesn't have to go any further than that if it hasn't already," Rush said hastily. "It would only damage morale."

"Which will happen anyway if the stones can't be fixed," Young pointed out. "And do you expect Eli and the science team to keep quiet forever about the real reason they're broken?"

Rush apparently didn't have an answer for that.

Young sighed and rubbed at his aching temples. "I'll tell Eli and the others to keep this under wraps for now, if it isn't already too late. I'd stay out of their way for a while, though, if I were you."

"If you were me." Rush murmured, lips curving into one of his sarcastic little smiles.

Young felt an answering smile tug at the corners of his own mouth. "Yeah."

For a moment they held each other's eyes, and Young felt like they might have reached a point of tentative understanding. They were united by this shared predicament, this fish-out-of-water experience they were both living through, and maybe they could use that to find their way back into some semblance of the alliance they had shared before.

But then abruptly, Rush's smile morphed into a sneer. "Well, you're not me, Colonel," he said, somehow giving a silken texture to Young's gravelly voice. "Don't think that just because you wear my skin, you know anything about me. You don't."

Young snorted in disgusted amusement. Right. Okay. After what Rush had put him through today, he wasn't going to let that fly. He was still angry, still hurt, still grieving over broken trust and shattered promises, and he had been so very patient up until this point. But now he was done. "You know what?" he snapped, rising to his feet. "You're absolutely right. I don't know a goddamn thing about you, Rush. If I did, I wouldn't have trusted you alone with the stones today. But I kinda thought we had this thing going where we actually _talk_ to each other before we make decisions that affect the whole crew. I guess I just wasn't listening closely enough back when you said our 'differences' were behind us."

He ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, feeling this body's buzzing temper come back to life. He had to fight to keep from shaking with it. It almost made him miss his own cold, black rages - at least _they _could be put to good use. "But you, Rush," he continued, working to keep his voice under control, "You don't know me either. If you did, this wouldn't have happened, and we wouldn't be having this conversation right now."

That was it, he needed to go. Young didn't want to hear Rush's response or find out what kind of contemptuous or recalcitrant expression he was projecting onto Young's own face. He just wanted out of Rush's presence, out of this pointless conversation. He made his way to the doorway, taking it slow but refusing to limp on his twisted ankle.

Just before he left the room, thoughts of playground fights and desperate resolutions flickered through his mind again, making him hesitate. He stood in the doorway, torn between his desire to escape and that faint yet lingering impulse to repair the bridges that Rush had just torn down. In his indecision, he looked back at Rush.

Rush was watching him intently, his face unreadable. Right. Well, Young hadn't exactly been expecting contrition.

"Quick question," he said, forcing a casual note into his tone.

Rush's brows went up. He lifted a hand and waved it in Young's direction, inviting him to continue.

"When you were a kid," Young asked, "did you own a book bag with a broken strap?"

The instantaneous transformation of Rush's expression would have been comical if Young hadn't had personal insight into the memories and emotions responsible for it. As it was, Rush's stricken and deeply confused appearance was less satisfying than Young had anticipated. "Y-yes," Rush stuttered out after a pause, and then his eyes narrowed sharply. "Why-?"

Young shrugged. "Just curious."

Rush looked like he was gearing up to ask more questions, but Young was not in the mood. He offered Rush a grim, humorless smile and then left the room. He had better uses for his time right now than to waste it on his errant chief scientist.


	7. Chapter 7

What did Young mean by it, bringing that up now? Was he beginning to gain access to Rush's memories, hardwired as they were somewhere in the neuron webwork of Rush's brain? Well wasn't that fantastic? Would Young pick up the kino surveillance again now too? Kinos following Rush's every step and no privacy even inside his own mind?

Rush curled a little tighter around his pains - you'd have thought Young might have some mercy on his own balls but you'd have been wrong. Now this body felt like one solid ache from the knees to the shoulder blades. But the curious part, the worst part, was the hole that seemed to have opened just under his breastbone that funneled straight down into the abyss. Rush's mind circled it like a penny on a slope, drawn in tighter, more hopeless spirals into the darkness and  
pressure and despair that could only be the frozen centre of the ninth level of hell.

This was the subterranean vault from which the anger rose up like a geyser, was it? The hollowness on the other side of that glorious rage. No wonder Young tried to be calm when he could, because his extremes were horrifying.

Well, no. Now they were Rush's extremes to manage. He wondered if he too would start casting his mind back and coming up with Young's memories. Some corn-fed childhood of playing football in a clapboard little mid American town, no doubt, where everyone watched John Wayne movies and checked under the bed for communists at night. Wouldn't that be wonderful.

It took far too much effort to straighten up and get himself to his feet, but he couldn't just sit here looking pathetic until someone found him, so he managed it anyway, eventually. His throat felt bruised - swallowing was painful. His jaw twinged at the hinge when he moved it, and all his teeth rattled. Having the headache back was almost a relief, he hardly knew himself without it, but the deep, offended throb of his balls and his stomach and his lower back? He could walk through it, slowly, and he wasn't going to spare it any more mind than that.

The inhabited areas of Destiny felt hostile, so he got himself a screwdriver and a torch and went to ground in one of the off-limits sections where they had found a number of Ancient crates, which Young had not as yet found the man-power to open and examine. Ancient tech was notoriously volatile and dangerous, but not, to his mind, as volatile and dangerous as human beings. He breathed easier in the silence, where the scent of the air was metal and grease and chalk from the filters rather than the stench of other people's disappointments.

Each crate here was about the size of a skip. Each had a bolted door on the inner wall, facing the back of the room. He jimmied one with the screwdriver, went inside, was hit in the face with a line of blue light that scanned him from head to toe. He froze. _Shit._ And it blinked out.

"Nicholas." It was Gloria. The blue light lay in her hand like a model of the Earth, its cloud formations swirling. It lit a room full of shelves, the shelves stocked with parts he didn't recognize. Something about them itched at his thoughts, but his mind was sluggish as usual so he waited for it to catch up, turned to the ship's projection, tried not to let it show that he didn't like her using that form, especially not when he looked like this.

"Nice to know I brought my hallucinations with me into this body."

"Nicholas, what have you done?" A million year old sun shone on her face and her hair. She looked, as always, part amused and part reproachful. And if she was Destiny then he thought she was amazing. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life studying her, but that didn't mean she was allowed to do the same thing to him. His inward workings were his own damn business.

"What I had to."

Clearly this amused her. She smiled the closed lipped smile that made her look like Botticelli's Venus. "You know, I wasn't a genius either, but you trusted me."

He suppressed the internal wince. She was a starship, programmed to work with a crew - of course her operating parameters would require that her crew be encouraged to work well together. If he thought of it that way, it was fine. Then he didn't have to think of her as a person whom he had to forgive for forcing him to make the grand poetic gesture that confirmed to everyone on board that she had chosen Young. If she was a machine then she was operating admirably. If she was a person then she had some fucking nerve expecting him to be alright with that.

"Strangely enough, I trusted Gloria because she did not have a history of repeatedly abandoning and killing me. The same can't be said of Young."

Her smile widened to show dimples. "Yet he always brings you back."

"Oh, and I suppose that makes it all right then, does it?" He cast his eyes up to the far corner of the crate because such stupidity merited nothing less than the full eye roll. When he looked down again, she was gone. "Very helpful. You could at least leave me a console."

She was still listening, clearly - if monitoring his brain waves counted as such. A virtual console blinked to life in the center of the room. He used it to set a search going for this shed and its contents in the database. See if he could get some information on what all this stuff was before he tried using it.

With that in place, he lowered himself to the floor, permitted his aching body to slump over to one side, lie down, cheek against the cool metal. The hole to hell had closed over by now, but he was conscious of it nevertheless, as though its surface was ice, barely thin enough to hold his weight. He wanted to sleep and wake up when things had fixed themselves without him. Or to sleep and not to wake up at all.

God, he hated it when one of his paradigms turned out to be shaky. If you couldn't believe in the foundations of your thought, where did that leave you?

He'd been so sure Young would kill him this time. He'd been so sure Young would kill him on the alien ship, after Eli and co had found the bridge. And he'd been wrong, twice. He'd been sure Young would kill his other self after the doppelganger had done for Telford - so sure that he had assisted with the man's suicide. What if he had been wrong then too? What a waste of intellectual resources.

He remembered dying in Kiva's custody - finding out later that it happened because Young had suffocated Telford in order to free him from brainwashing. Rush's life had been merely incidental to that little drama. The conclusion had seemed inescapable - Telford mattered to Young, Rush did not.

_Yet he always brings you back._

Even that first time. It had been Young's (borrowed) hand that freed him from the aliens, gave him the chance to find his own way home. Why would Young do that, if he had wanted rid of Rush? All he had to do was walk away and no one, not even Rush himself, would ever have known.

The wheels of his mind had been allowed to go rusty. Pushing them down this track was exhausting, and they met a resistance there, something that tasted just like anguish. But this conclusion was also inescapable: Young had brought Rush back because he wanted to.

Rush groaned, rolled over, covering his face in case something in the empty room might be watching. Tentatively, he allowed himself to approach another, related idea, this one even more dangerous. "He did it to save you," Volker had said. Young had failed to vent the gate room, failed to kill the Lucian Alliance with one blow, put the entire ship in danger in the process, because he was trying to save Rush.

No, no, no, no, that was laughable. Young must have known that gate travel would sever the  
link. He would have put their lives on the line to save Telford, to save _Telford_, who was his friend, unworthy though fucking Telford was of one millionth tiny part of such loyalty.

Yet no one other than Rush seemed aware that the link could be disrupted that way. Not even the science team had known it. Could he really believe that _Young_ did?

If he couldn't, then the truth must be that Young had done that _for him._ Young had chosen to risk the ship, the crew, the mission, to risk and lose his unborn child, rather than sacrifice Rush.

That thought sat in the middle of the room like an adder. He scrambled up and away from it, putting his back to the wall as though an unwary move might cause it to pounce.  
No. No, no. Absolutely not. If he let that thought in it would fucking _break_ him. So he was not going to entertain it. He was going to...

The hand he raised to push through his hair was black with the gunk of the floor, and the side of his face felt sticky from where he had rested it against the deck plating.

No more thinking for tonight. He was going to have a shower and go to bed. Tomorrow it would become clear that he had not fundamentally misconstrued everything. He had not... actually been in a situation where he was safe and valued, only to completely undermine and destroy it by his own mistrust.

That didn't sound at all like something he would do.

As it turned out, he had somewhat misconstrued the shower too, though this only struck him when he had thrown jacket, shirt and undershirt onto the bench and caught sight of his own shoulder and chest - stocky, broad, solid as they were. He closed his eyes. Crap.

Not showering was not tenable, however. He told himself he was fifty two years old and had never been a prude, managed to strip to the skin and get himself inside the cubicle that way. But he shut his eyes again in the warm mist, scarcely dared scrub at his dirty face, conscious of the heavy bones beneath his unfamiliar fingertips. He felt shy, unaccountably shy and jumpy around himself, as if he was trespassing, and that was ridiculous since this body was now essentially his own.

He still cut the shower short and went to bed having done little more than soak. As he hugged himself in the warm darkness (his arms too bulky, his ribs too wide for comfort) a sense of loss came flowering out of all the angles of the room, choking the inside of his chest, filling his throat with fleshy petals, making it hard to breathe.

The truth was, he liked this body. He'd always envied its power. He found its black-lashed golden eyes strikingly beautiful. There had been occasions when he had wanted to pull on the increasingly untidy curly mess of its hair just to feel the texture. But... He examined its nicely shaped hands, slid one up the opposite forearm and sighed.

But honestly? He liked it on Young. He liked the incongruous combination of this rather brutal  
form with Young's new gentleness. The way Young walked in it - normally so unassuming, so undemonstrative, and yet sometimes there'd be this hitch of the hip and it would all become casually, confidently magnificent. Rush liked that maybe better than he should.

Now it was gone, and he missed it. He missed seeing Young padding about the ship like a weary lion. The fact that he could do it himself was no compensation at all.

He sighed again. The stones were still inoperative - he could not be replaced. He had not been killed for that, and even his punishment was over. He had achieved everything he set out to do and lost nothing of any moment. So why did he feel so bad?

After another two hours of lying in the dark, fruitlessly waiting for sleep to arrive, he gave up, sloped off to the mess for a cup of tea, reasonably confident that no one would be there at this ungodly hour. But he was wrong about that too.

"Dr. Rush?" said Chloe tentatively as he picked up a mug from the tray by the door. He added a pinch of the mixed leaves Becker had left in a serving bowl nearby and filled it at the spigot before edging over. She had not yet flown at him in a whirlwind of slapping and kicks, so it seemed safe enough. "Is it really you?"

"You know, I'm not sure I know the answer to that anymore," he replied, levering himself gingerly into a chair at her table. "When the stones are active, a person's consciousness still arises from their own body. It's simply transferred to a new... drone, so to speak... for the duration of the proceedings. That's why they retain all their memories, their personality and so forth. This is something quite different. Both of us are trying to be ourselves with brains that are simply not set up to do that. I don't know what will happen in the long run - whether you will lose us both, and some new combination will arise in our absence. I..."

He smiled at her pinched look, while the FTL lights blued her face, and he knew she knew everything there was to know about losing yourself. Though maybe not the grief of watching it happen to someone else.

"You can't have wanted this."

"No," he agreed, warmed as always by the undeserved trust she still placed in him. "No, I didn't."

"So you're going to work out a way of fixing the stones and putting it right, right?"

He supposed she had a mother for whom she wanted to go back. He'd forgotten about that. "Honestly, Chloe," he said, breathing in not-exactly-aniseed flavored steam, "I don't know. I can't see a way and I'm so tired. I'd set it right if I could, of course." He wasn't even completely sure that was a lie any more, but it made no difference, did it? The stones were broken beyond even his own ability to repair. He'd made sure of that. "But unfortunately I don't think I can."


	8. Chapter 8

Young was quite accustomed to going without sleep. Life on Destiny was dangerous and unpredictable, and marathon shifts were not as uncommon as he would have liked. But he rarely found it difficult to fall asleep once he had actually climbed into bed. Most soldiers developed the ability to fall asleep whenever and wherever they could as a simple survival tool. Rush, however, was no soldier, and he clearly did _not_ have that particular ability. It had been two days since Young had found himself stuck in Rush's body, and aside from a few short naps, he hadn't slept during that time. Now he was lying in bed again, staring at the ceiling and watching the shifting patterns created by the fluctuating glow of FTL travel. As he watched, his head throbbed in time with the flickering starlight.

He had ceased to think of his headache in terms of simple pain. It was a pulsing, howling _presence_, riding around on his shoulders and piercing his skull with its long, serrated fangs. He had tried ignoring it, soothing it with self-administered neck and scalp massages, and even bargaining with it as if were a real creature that could be reasoned with. If this went on much longer, he was going to have to give it a name.

But it wasn't just the headache keeping him awake. He had too much experience sleeping through pain for that to be the problem. No, it was his fucking _brain_. It wouldn't stop - it wouldn't even slow down. Images darted through his mind, a steady stream of ideas solidifying and interweaving, insights and connections lighting up one after another like street lamps at dusk. They were very much his own thoughts - his concerns, his preoccupations, his interests - but this was not the way his mind usually processed them. It was too fast, too bright, too all-consuming, and he was at the mercy of that unending flow of data.

The worst of it was, his thoughts kept sliding back to Rush. No matter how much he wanted to distract himself, his mind was determined to fixate on his biggest looming problems, all of which involved Rush. And Young really, really didn't want to think about Rush right now. There were too many emotions tied to those thoughts, too much anger and hurt and confusion and loss. It was the sense of loss that bothered him the most. He was actually grieving as though he had been betrayed by someone he cared about. Not even Telford's many treacheries had elicited this response from him, and yet Telford was ostensibly a friend, and Rush… well, Rush had been a tentative ally at best.

Young let out a grunt of irritation at his own train of thought and absently ran his fingers through his hair. He had begun to find this motion soothing, relishing the fine, soft texture between his fingers and the light tugging sensation along his scalp. He had abandoned the idea of cutting it all off. Somehow, that seemed like such a waste. He had always liked Rush's hair: the way it framed his face, the way it caught the light, the way it flared and shifted when he moved. He had liked it better on _Rush_, of course. That went without saying. He had liked everything about Rush better on Rush.

As he stroked his hair, his wrist scraped lightly against Rush's beard. He huffed out a soft breath, reminded again of the last time he had stopped shaving his own face. He had been in the midst of a personal crisis, aching and depressed and barely able to function. He had always had a tendency to give up on personal grooming when he gave up hope. Accordingly, the beard felt like a symbol of weakness. It felt like failure, and he was tired of carrying around that personal reminder. He just wanted to be rid of it.

Fuck it. This was his body, wasn't it? Rush had seen to that. The hair could stay, but the beard had to go.

Decided on this course of action and glad to have something to do besides _think_, Young pushed himself out of bed. He flicked on the lights, located his electric razor, and made his way to his shaving mirror. As he shaved, Young took his time to accommodate for his new, unfamiliar bone structure. It was a bit of an adjustment, but he knew he'd get used to it eventually… along with everything else he needed to get used to.

A few minutes later, Rush's cleanshaven face stared back at him in the mirror. Young blinked a few times, taken aback by how much sharper Rush's features looked without any scruff. Even on Icarus base, he couldn't remember ever seeing Rush without at least a few day's growth of stubble. But now it was gone, and there was something quite hawkish and predatory about his face that Young had never noticed before. Hmm. That would be an adjustment, too.

Young set aside the razor and turned off the lights. He toppled back into bed, pulled up the covers, and let out a deep sigh. He felt slightly more at ease now that he had done something to claim this body for his own. Unfortunately, his head still pounded as if someone was hammering nails into it, and his brain still didn't show any signs succumbing to sleep. So he lay awake as the hours crept by, watching the play of ghostly lights upon his ceiling and trying to think about anything but Rush.

TJ was pretty sure that her early motives for studying medicine had been noble. Caretaking, saving lives, that sort of thing. All very high-minded and optimistic stuff. She doubted that any of her original reasons had involved having an excuse to secrete herself away in the infirmary and avoid drama unfolding elsewhere. But at this moment, that was the aspect of her calling that she was most grateful for. Here, in her orderly little kingdom, she could be alone. She could do her work in relative peace, comfortable in the knowledge that it was not her job to offer empty reassurances to her anxious shipmates or monitor for signs of dangerous unrest. That was for Scott, James, and Greer to worry about. Instead, she was going to spend her morning continuing her study of Destiny's medical archives. That was a much better use of her time than worrying about problems she had no power to solve.

Not that she was worried, per se. So her commander and erstwhile lover had exchanged bodies with a man of dubious integrity and pronounced Machiavellian tendencies with whom he shared an extremely rocky history. Well, that was slightly disconcerting. But bad blood aside, it was common enough to see people wandering around Destiny in bodies that didn't belong to them, so why should this be any different? And yes, Telford had staged another attempted power grab and McKay, that self-important ass, had apparently broken the communication stones. That was… Okay, it was potentially really bad, but the science team was on the job and she had great faith in their collective ability to work eleventh hour miracles. It was all going to be okay. She wasn't worried. Not really.

TJ gave a sigh of annoyance. She had just read the same paragraph on her laptop three times in a row, and she still didn't know what it said. She hadn't been able to concentrate all morning.

Okay, maybe she was a little worried.

It wasn't so much that the communication stones were broken. That was a potentially dire situation if it couldn't be fixed, but the science team would find a way. They always did. No, it was Rush and Colonel Young's situation that really bothered her, and she couldn't even quite put her finger on why, exactly. She just knew that something was wrong. Something beyond the obvious. The Colonel was exhibiting a certain air of defeat that was a little too familiar, and yet there was also a new intensity about his speech and movements that was somewhat disquieting. She didn't know what to make of it, but the combination didn't seem to bode well for his mental health.

As for Rush, she hadn't seen him since the incident occurred. At first she had assumed that he was devoting all his time to fixing the stones - getting completely absorbed in a project and forgetting little things like food and sleep was not exactly new behavior for Rush - but an overheard comment from Dr. Volker revealed that the rest of the science team hadn't seen much of Rush lately either. So what was he up to? Did the Colonel know? Was that why he seemed so troubled? And did it have anything to do with the fact that she had noticed a bit of bruising beneath the scruff on Young's jaw yesterday?

She sighed again and rubbed at her eyes as if her distraction was just a matter of blurred vision. "None of this is helpful," she muttered to herself.

"What isn't helpful?" came a soft voice from the open doorway.

TJ let her hands drop into her lap and turned to find Colonel Young leaning against the doorframe. He offered her a small smile, but there was something pained about the tightness of the lines around his eyes.

"Nothing," she replied, rising to her feet and returning his smile with as much warmth as she could muster. "I was just talking to myself."

He pushed away from doorframe and walked toward the instrument table that she had repurposed as a desk. She watched him approach, noting his straight posture and deliberate, unhurried steps. That was all Young, and it was reassuring to see. But the impression of energy trapped below the surface - the suggestion of something caged - was new. Or if not new, it wasn't usually detectable unless he was feeling either particularly angry or particularly… amorous.

As he drew closer, she noticed that he had shaved. And yes, that was definitely a fading bruise on his jaw. Something _had_ happened between him and Rush, then. It figured.

The question was, how had Rush weathered the encounter? Was he sporting any interesting bruises? Was he hiding out somewhere, licking his wounds, and was that why no one had seen him? It was possible that Rush had been the victor, of course, given that he was in Young's body. However, TJ rather doubted it. She had seen the Colonel take down larger, stronger opponents before, and he knew his own body's weaknesses better than anyone. No, she suspected that Rush had gotten the worst of it.

"Something wrong?" Young asked, a note of concern creeping into his voice. He studied her through Rush's dark, hooded eyes, giving them a softness that she had never seen before. There were hints of affection in that gaze, awkward and imperfectly masked. It was uncomfortable, but it was also achingly sweet.

"No," she assured him. "Nothing's wrong, exactly. I'm just…" She paused, running her eyes over him again. Now that they were separated only by the width of her desk, the signs of his discomfort and exhaustion were more evident. "How are you?" she asked.

He lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, and she recognized it as one of Rush's habitual motions. "I think there's something wrong with me," he confessed quietly. "I think the stones might have done more than just switch my consciousness with Rush's. My head… it feels like there's an electrical storm going on up there."

"Headache?" TJ asked sympathetically. She had wondered about that.

"Yeah," Young said. "Not the worst I've ever had, but definitely the most relentless. It's been two and a half days, and it's not showing any signs of letting up." He looked almost apologetic, as if he had just admitted to something shameful. "But it's not just that," he continued."It's… my mind feels overstimulated. Or possibly under-stimulated, I don't really know. I can't slow down my thoughts; they just take over and cycle around and around." He made a revolving motion with one raised finger. "I can't shut my brain up or slow it down. I can't sleep. Feels like a never ending caffeine high."

Never ending caffeine high. Hmm. Although Rush's outward presentation was usually calm and collected, that still seemed like a pretty fair description of his baseline mental state. The scientist had an uncanny alertness about him, and his mind always seemed to be actively engaged in solving some problem or developing some scheme. And now Colonel Young had inherited that overactive brain, and he was feeling understandably overwhelmed by it.

"Okay," TJ replied thoughtfully. "I think you're talking about two unrelated problems."

Young lifted his brows. His vaguely hopeful expression looked out of place on Rush's face, but it was rather endearing.

"First," TJ began, "I don't think the headache has anything to do with the stones. I've always suspected that Rush had chronic headaches, and it's really not surprising. He works all the time and rarely sleeps. He has terrible posture and spends hours hunched over consoles, so his spine is probably in bad shape at this point. And he almost never wears his glasses anymore. Any one of those factors could cause headaches. Taken together-"

"Nightmare scenario, got it," Young murmured. "His eyesight is definitely worse than mine."

"You should probably borrow his glasses if you're going to be doing any paperwork," TJ advised. "And for the pain…" She walked over to her little pharmacy and took down a small jar filled with fine gray-green dust. "Mix a pinch of this with some water. You can take it every four hours." She returned to her desk and held out the jar to him.

He accepted it with evident reluctance and turned it over a few times in his hands. Then he lifted his eyes, staring at her reproachfully from under his brows. It was such a classic Young expression that she couldn't suppress her answering grin. "TJ," he said slowly, "Is this what I think it is?"

"If you're thinking it's that new medicinal-" she began.

"The one the science team has been getting high on several times a week-"

"They're calling it 'clinical trials,' I think."

Young snorted and looked down at the jar in his hand. "Tempting as it is, I can't afford to compromise my thought process right now. Or ever, really."

She wondered if he had thought about that back when he was drinking himself to sleep every night, but she wisely didn't bring it up. "It won't get you high at the dose I mentioned," she promised. "It will relax the tense muscles in your neck and shoulders and take the edge off your headache. It might even help you sleep. You can double the dose at bedtime if you need to."

The Colonel unscrewed the lid from the jar and sniffed its contents. He tilted his head, shrugged, and replaced the lid. "Okay, I'll give it a try. What about the, um… other problem?"

"Right," murmured TJ. She shifted uncomfortably. "That… also probably has nothing to do with the stones."

"You mean this… having his brain in overdrive all the time, that's normal for Rush too?" he asked, and he actually looked more amused than upset. "Well, that at least explains a few things about him."

No kidding. "Scott told me that you and Rush aren't connected by the stones anymore. That for all intents and purposes, this is your body now." She gestured toward him.

He sobered immediately, as if her words had brought to mind a particularly unpleasant memory. Oh yes, there was definitely more going on here behind the scenes than anyone had let on. TJ wondered just how concerned she ought to be. Judging by the Colonel's grim expression, very.

"That's correct," was Young's only comment. He glanced down at the cylindrical jar in his hand and began to roll it slowly between his palms. He was fidgeting, albeit in a very controlled manner. Still, it was the most un-Young-like thing she had seen him do so far, and she didn't like it.

"So your consciousness is fully integrated with his brain at the moment. Honestly, Colonel, with totally unfamiliar brain chemistry to contend with, it's amazing that you're doing as well as you are. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just going to be a really rough learning curve, I think."

She tore her eyes away from his hands to take in his face. With his eyes cast down and his head tilted forward, he looked more defeated than ever. Some protective instinct flared inside her, and she reached out to lay a hand on his arm. He froze, then shot a questioning look from behind a few stray locks of hair.

"Just distract yourself. Give your mind something to do," she suggested, injecting an encouraging note into her voice which was only slightly forced. She glanced quickly around the room for inspiration, then spotted the laptop on the desk. "Why don't you try reading something? The Ancient database is full of interesting information. Not just about science and medicine, but all kinds of things. History, literature, politics, military tactics. I'm sure you can find something…" she trailed off, noting the way his eyes had sharpened at her suggestion.

He peered at her intently, then looked down at the laptop. And _oh god_, it was as if Rush's consciousness had stepped right back into his body in that moment. He had suddenly acquired that hungry, calculating look that she had come to associate with Rush but which she had never expected from Young. "Yes," he murmured, "of course. I'm him. I might as well make the most of it."

TJ slowly withdrew her hand from his arm. "I suppose so," she said cautiously. "What are you planning to do?"

Young laughed softly and lifted his eyes. Just like that, he was himself again. The straight posture, gentle smile, and understated air of anticipation all clearly belonged to Colonel Young in one of his happier moods. "I'm going to do some reading," he said. "Thanks for your help, TJ."

"You're welcome," she said, somewhat relieved. He nodded and turned to go, but she called after him, "How's Rush?"

That took the spring out of his step at once. He turned slowly back toward her, his expression carefully neutral. "I haven't seen him in two days," he said evenly. Neither his tone nor his face gave anything away, but she knew him. She could knew what it meant when his shoulders went rigid, and she could see the way he was gripping that little jar of medicinal powder tightly enough to turn his knuckles white.

"I'm guessing that's when he tagged you on the jaw, then," she said, tapping at her own jaw line.

He blinked a few times, then smiled humorlessly. "It was the only solid hit he got in."

"I figured," she said. "So how is he? Breathing, I assume. How about walking? I haven't seen him around."

"Everything should be in working order," he assured her, and a hint of amusement crept into his voice.

She nodded, marginally reassured. "What did he do this time?"

He rubbed at his eyes, and that blanket of weary disillusionment seemed to envelope him again. "Something really, really stupid," he growled, "and appallingly selfish. But mostly just stupid." He let his hand drop and heaved a sigh. "But I understand why he did it."

"That… sounds like a step in the right direction, at least," TJ said, trying to be optimistic and not to think too hard about what sort of stupid and appallingly selfish thing Rush could have done.

Young shook his head. "Nope, I don't think so. We're never going to get anywhere until he understands a few things about _me_. And that," he said with a grim little smile, "is _never_ going to happen."

And with that, he turned on his heel and walked out of the infirmary, apparently deciding that their conversation was over.

TJ stared after him for a few moments, then dropped into her chair with a little groan. Her strategy had clearly been flawed; the infirmary was just as likely to attract drama as anywhere else on this ship, if not more so. Now she had a whole new set of problems to worry about, and that grieved look in the Colonel's eyes was going to haunt her for the rest of the day.


	9. Chapter 9

The ship was reassuringly quiet as Young made his way to the shower room with a bundle of clothes tucked under his arm. Most of the crew was asleep, which was just as well. Taking a shower was going to be awkward enough without a potential audience. The design of the shower stalls on Destiny really didn't do much to promote privacy. And no, Young had never been self-conscious about his own nudity before - the military trained that out of you pretty quick - but it was different in Rush's body. He hadn't even taken a thorough look at _himself_ yet. He certainly didn't want to give anyone else an eyeful.

At least he didn't have to do this with his head pounding and his shoulders aching. He had taken his first dose of TJ's medicinal powder a few hours ago, and now he was almost pain-free. There was just that hint of a languid, floating sensation that he imagined could be _very_ pleasurable at a higher dose, but he was sticking to his one pinch every four hours, thank you very much. He'd leave the 'clinical trials' to the science team.

Young unfolded the spare SGC uniform he had uncovered in the supply room - it had previously belonged to Corporal Gorman, and looked like it would fit Rush's small figure fairly well - and hung it over the glass partition of the shower stall. Then came the first of the awkward steps to getting clean: undressing. Young swallowed and stared down at himself, trying to figure out where to start. He decided to take off Rush's boots first out of sheer cowardice. But once his socks had also been discarded, he had to man up and get serious about this. He hastily slipped out of Rush's vest and then pulled both t-shirts over his head all at once.

And that was where things started to go downhill. Because Rush's chest was nearly hairless, which he found he liked, and Rush's flat stomach was really quite nice. Young pressed his hand to his abdomen and traced the outline of lean muscles under soft skin. Rush was skinny, but he was stronger than he looked. Young had known that for quite a while. But it was a different thing to be able to feel the evidence with his own - okay, with Rush's - fingertips.

But he was letting himself get sidetracked. Flushing slightly, he unbuckled Rush's belt and shoved down his jeans and underwear without delay or ceremony. He then kicked Rush's clothes off to one side and stepped into the shower, promising himself that he would not get distracted again.

The warm mist felt as delicious against his bare skin as always, and that was comforting. Not that he had really expected bathing to be all that different in Rush's body than in his own. Except for the whole minefield of being naked while inhabiting a body he was perversely attracted to, of course, which he was _not_ thinking about.

While continuing to _not_ think about that, he began to massage the mist into his skin, starting with his scalp and working his way down. This strategy worked great until he got to a certain point, and then he paused, staring helplessly down at himself. Because there was Rush's cock, soft and uncut and nestled amidst curling brown hair, and it looked so very tempting. Young's fingers itched to touch and explore and experiment. If only he weren't hampered by this inconvenient twinge of guilt.

And why should he feel guilty, after all? It was mostly Rush's fault that he was in this situation. Rush had broken the stones. Rush had either delayed or destroyed their ability to return to their own bodies. Rush had betrayed him. So was Young supposed to abstain from any kind of sexual release forever, out of _politeness_? It seemed absurd, viewed in that light. Rush really had no right to fault him for _anything_ he chose to do with this body.

Tentatively, Young reached down to take Rush's cock in hand. It was already beginning to stir, responding to his growing excitement. He used his thumb to nudge back the foreskin and swipe over the head, and he drew in a quick breath at the sensation. Wow, okay. Sensitive. Young blinked a few times, feeling his pulse speed up. He adjusted his grip on his hardening cock and tried a few quick strokes. He winced. Too rough. Rush required a slightly gentler touch, apparently. He tried again, and this time… oh yes, that was perfect. That rhythm was divine, and if he gripped himself just so…

Young groaned softly and leaned his back against the glass. He arched his back and gave himself up to pleasure, abandoning any notion of maintaining boundaries between himself and this borrowed body. He was so sick of denying himself in one way or another. He was going to take this, and he was going to draw every last ounce of enjoyment from it.

Rush's erect cock was long and slender and pretty, just as Young would have predicted. It was almost elegant, if something so carnal could be described in such a way. He loved the feel of it in his… well, in _Rush's_ hand. That set him off thinking what it would actually feel like in his own larger, stronger hand, but no, it was better not to think about that right now. This was weird enough already.

He increased the speed of his strokes, but it still wasn't quite enough. He began to move his hips instead, thrusting up into his fist. Yes. Oh _fuck_. That was brilliant. The little noises that escaped him made him feel even more desperate, because that was Rush's voice and he had never heard Rush sound so vulnerable or needy. Those gasps and whimpers were exquisite. And he wasn't supposed to be thinking about Rush, _he wasn't supposed to be thinking about Rush_, but his mind went there anyway and _god_, the images in his head would terrify him if he wasn't so damn turned on. Images of Rush writhing under his hands and crying out with pleasure. Rush sprawled out, open and inviting. Rush trusting Young, for once in his damn life, to do something other than hurt him. And Young wouldn't disappoint. Young would give him more bliss than he knew what to do with. Young would…

Young sucked in a sharp breath and threw back his head, vibrating with his release. Then he sagged back against the glass partition. There were spots floating before his eyes and a buzzing in his head and a tingling energy all over his body. He focused on these physical sensations rather than on any of the forbidden fantasies that had just intruded upon his climax. He was going to shove those firmly back into the dark recesses of his mind where they usually lived, exiled and unacknowledged. Because while his attraction to Rush wasn't anything new, present circumstances made it even more inconvenient than usual.

He just hoped that the stones could be fixed and things could revert back to normal soon. In the meantime, he'd take TJ's advice and start a new course of study. Maybe that would have a dampening effect on his libido.

Rush leaned back against the headboard of his bed and acknowledged the utility of keeping out of the way for a while. In fact it was no hardship to concentrate on his own interests rather than face the tedium of administration and all the little stressors that came from other people's unreasonableness. He had gladly sorted through the devices in his newly opened shed and concluded that they all belonged to one larger machine – that they slotted together somehow to produce one unified effect.

He had his suspicions about what he was building, but he reserved final judgement until he had it complete. In the mean time, assembling a ridiculously complicated alien device out of its constituent parts with no blueprint but for a vague feeling of what fitted where... it was an absorbing challenge that he was happy to have the time to work on.

He massaged his temples with his fingers, trying to stave off the inevitable return of his headache. His right hand throbbed from where he had lost his temper with himself this morning and slammed it against the wall. While he had to give it to this brain that it did in fact get there eventually, working with it was like being a salmon trying to swim up a waterfall. The fucking effort involved, he'd had no idea. The waste of time. The frustration. He could not stay like this.

And he was so fucking tired. He was tired like the marrow of his bones had been replaced with dust and the flesh on him was lead. He was tired like the air was sump oil and it was labour to breathe. He opened his eyes in the mornings and thought 'no, God, not again.' He couldn't understand where this was coming from, because as far as he knew this body was fit and healthy, younger than his own, and ought to be spilling over with vitality. He should not be so drained.

But he was, and potential lynchings aside he refused to be driven out of his own quarters by any threat, so although he kept off the crew's radar willingly enough while he was working, he returned often to his room to sleep. They only had to come by frequently if they really wanted to find him. For a beating, or whatever.

None had done so, so far. Three days in, he was beginning to relax his vigilance a little, dare to entertain the possibility that none would. So the knock on the door as he was lying down to rest was unwelcome. His heart rate kicked up a little, but not much. It was too heavy for fear.

He opened the door.

"Rush."

"Young."

Of course it was Young. He didn't wish to speak to Young or think of him, so of course he was to be forced to do both.

The man looked like he'd made himself very at home in Rush's body. He'd found a uniform approximately his own size. Judging from the darker splotches around the collar, it had probably once been Gorman's. He was clean shaven, with his hair tied back in a twist of broken bootlace. _What made you think you could shave without my permission?_ Rush thought, rousing from his state of squashed apathy for a moment of blessed irritation.

The hair was damp too. Young had showered, in his body, and wasn't it an absolute certainty that he had not been as circumspect about it as Rush had? Young was a bull in a china shop where finer feelings were concerned. Even if he thought them pretty he wouldn't be able to prevent himself from trampling them, and the chances were he wouldn't give them that much thought. He would hit them because he loved to hear them smash.

_Well, I hope you liked what you saw._ Rush's mouth quirked up. A sliver of amused glee uncoiled in the pit of his stomach unexpectedly, lightening the weight on his back, _because you're stuck with it._

Young raised his eyebrows at the smile, and yes, perhaps they had stood watching each other for a little too long, but it was still remarkable to see each other like this. It was still worth looking.

Rush stepped back and gestured him to come in. "What can I do for you?"

Young's sceptical smile was so much an echo of his own that it gave him deja vu. He took it to mean '_now_ you ask', and it was reassuring to know that life went on. Some things were constant, and Young's disapproval was one of them.

"Tell me you have the stones fixed?" Young walked in, moving more like himself now. He sat down on Rush's bed as though he owned it, and obviously part of him did. They were bleeding together at the edges, Rush and he, becoming one flesh - a marriage with none of the fun.

And _that _wasn't a track Rush intended to follow any further into the wild, particularly when it did not fill him with quite the degree of horror he had been hoping for. Disengage, and fast.

"I think I told you already, Colonel, that isn't possible." He held up a hand to forestall Young's anger. "Instead I've been working on another of our other long term problems."

"Which is?"

That had put the chill back in the conversation all right. Just as well. "I've discovered a device I think may be a precursor of the Goa'uld sarcophagus. It's in pieces at the moment but I think I can make it operational before long."

Young shook his head. "Those things make you psychotic."

Which was almost identical to his response to the chair – rule it out because of the obvious dangers without even thinking about the potential benefits. The man was such a coward.

"I'd have thought you'd have been willing to take that risk if it meant a cure for Doctor Park. And Lieutenant Johansen, of course"

Young stiffened into immobility, even his unconscious movements stilling. _Got you_, Rush thought, with something of an internal smile. _See. I can offer you good things. I'm well worth keeping around. Just don't ask me to work on a way to get myself replaced, because I'm not doing that. I'm not._

Young's deep sigh didn't have quite the same sepulchral ring it had in his own voice. He folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward. "TJ's condition, and Lisa's... they're not urgent right now like the stones are."

Now Rush was amused again. "I never thought I'd see the day. You're putting mission priorities ahead of individuals? It seems my body's doing you some good."

"Rush." Young stepped on the banter as if it was a snake, impatient, all business. Oh, and they had reverted to this, had they? This was not a man who was ever likely again to offer to play chess, or attempt awkward small talk early in the morning on the first bridge shift of the day. It gave Rush a pang that he despised in himself. One little misdemeanor and suddenly he was being treated like a criminal again? He tightened his lips to prevent them from curving down, as a great sullen swell of resentment replaced his awareness of loss. He lifted his chin and looked Young in his eyes. They were dark as black coffee, but many degrees colder.

"Maybe ordering you to repair the stones is never going to work, because you'd just break whatever the science team is doing anyway. But I _am_ ordering you to at least work on getting us two detangled, because you can't want this any more than I do. Maybe there your own damn self interest will keep you in line."

This had always been the problem between the two of them. What on Destiny made Young think that he had the right to tell Rush what to do? Young seemed to imagine that just because he was in charge of his thugs he was therefore in charge of everything else, but Rush had worked all his life to be out of that system, and he did not ever intend to be subject to it again.

"Oh by all means. I'll make every science decision contingent on your orders in future, shall I? 'Oh deary me, it's going to blow up. Never mind, Young said to do it so we'll do it anyway, damn the torpedoes-'"

"What the hell is your problem?" Young stood up, stepped in close. Time paused in a moment when they were both aware another fight was just a heartbeat away, just the width of their skin. Rush's borrowed heart beat fast and strong as his body came alive around him.

Then Young backed off, shaking his head. "I'm the only thing standing between you and a lynch mob right now Rush. How about you start working on that just to humour me, okay?"

Rush's 'problem', if anyone could call it that, was that he did not react well to threats. He had been beaten, and robbed most of his life, but he had never let the bully win. He was not about to start now. Nevertheless he also did not have time or energy for another brawl right now, and one of the two of them needed to act like a reasonable man. He let out the breath he had been holding, turned slightly aside. "Whatever you say."

Young eyed him suspiciously, wrongfooted by the apparent concession, but toned his aggressiveness down a notch. Rubbing the back of his neck, breathing slow and deliberately, he regarded the floor as if he was inspecting an underling's bunk for dust. Rush was just about to suggest that he might like to bugger off when Young raised his head again and took a pair of glasses out of his top pocket.

"I didn't actually come here to fight."

"Well, I know you've a lot of experience in doing things you never intended to do." Rush twisted the knife because he could, but Young didn't rise to the bait. His smooth, closed off, closed down expression didn't give Rush the satisfaction it should. Why was everything so fucking complicated with this man, when Rush's analysis of the situation still said it was simple?

"I came to offer a swap." He tipped the glasses in Rush's direction. "I guess these fit you now. I was hoping you'd let me use yours."

Rush took them delicately, anxiety worming a tendril through the briar patch of his anger. He hadn't expected this. What did it mean? Neanderthals like Young hardly needed glasses – he surely didn't read for pleasure. So... was it some kind of overture? One of those bizarre social things that people did that he had often meant to read some anthropology to try to understand, only there were always more important things to do with his time. Those things that people expected you to know, without ever telling you how they worked or what they signified.

Yet there seemed no harm in it. He fetched his own spectacles from the nightstand and passed them over. Possibly he was overreacting and the man did have paperwork and administrative drudgery of that sort to attend to after all. "You're behind on your reports?"

Young looked him over as if he had read all of Rush's unflattering thoughts on his face. But he just took the glasses and sighed. "Something like that."

After he left, Rush tried to turn to mathematics for comfort, sweeping clear the wall by his bed and selecting a perfect new piece of chalk in a pre-maths ritual that should have left him feeling calmed, clear, and brimming over with a kind of disciplined anticipation. What mystery of the deep foundations of the universe should he model today? What principle should he examine and turn over and discover the rightness and the beauty thereof? The streaks of starry phosphorescence that curled from Destiny's prow, for example, what made them? What determined their shape? the same structure that underlay the curve of the petals of a rose? Of a seashell? It seemed a good place to start.

He worked for half an hour, not without results, but without satisfaction. At the end of it, with little more than a single line of equations, he threw the chalk down and flung himself disconsolately on his bed. It wasn't that he couldn't get there - he knew he could - but the fun had gone out of it. Admittedly the first half an hour, if it wasn't a blessed relief to thoughts that had been pent up too long and were trying to explode his skull from the inside, could sometimes be an exercise in getting traction. But he should have been able to feel himself engage with the problem by now - should have felt the solid coupling to a train of ideas, and the driving excitement to see where it lead.

And he didn't. It was hard work and he was tired. Maybe he should sleep and hope that tomorrow when he woke this grinding fatigue might have finally lifted - hope that he hadn't sacrificed the very thing that gave his life meaning in his attempt to keep it.

Fucking Young and his fucking brain. He might have known it would be substandard. He might have known he couldn't endure life as one of the enemy, a man who represented everything animal in life that Rush had transcended and left behind.

Maybe it was that thought that followed him into sleep and gave him uneasy dreams as he curled around the slow ache of his hand and faced the thought that he might be doomed to stay like this for good.

~

_His dreams are incoherent. Little snatches of the past like photos pinned to a stranger's album, remembered voices like a radio on in another room, pictures without sound. He's little and the classroom is packed, and the kid behind him keeps peppering his back with spitballs, and he wants to turn around and smack the guy one, but he doesn't. He just keeps looking at the triangle on the board and trying to figure out how the teacher got to where she got to from the things she told them, because he can't make it work out at all._

"Everyone understand that?"

There's nodding all around, and he feels kind of sick because he's the only one who hasn't got it, and that must mean he's the stupidest guy in the school, but he puts his hand up anyway because he wants to know. "Can you... can you go through it again?"

She shares a smug little smile with the kids at the front, and maybe she thinks he doesn't know that's part pity and part contempt, but he'd have to be dumb as a rock to miss that. "Everett, maybe you should try to pay attention more. Now for the benefit of those of you who are not slow, we'll move on to the next question."

He spends the next quarter of an hour in a fume of shame and rage, feeling every laugh and sidelong glance like a nettle sting. So he decides he'll show her, and at recess he goes to the library and looks it up, figures it out on his own there in the quiet. It's not that hard really, she just explained it badly. He feels a little better knowing he's prepared if anyone ever asks that question again, though of course they never do.

~

It's a new school. It's smaller and grubbier than the old. After the divorce, his mother works too hard and now there's not enough money to live in the good part of town. He'd finally got to grips with the old school, knew all the cliques and the gangs, who to avoid, who to knock down on sight and who to share his lunch with. The teachers had almost begun to stop being surprised when he passed his tests. Now he realizes he should have known a new school meant all of that to learn again. He should have prepared before he even arrived. He keeps his mouth shut for the first four weeks, observing, and that's what people remember of him for the next four years.

He's too much of a swot for the stupid kids and the smart ones laugh in his face. Everyone seems to want him to get into football, but he can't see the point.

~

"Sweetheart," says his mother, gray curls squashed under a spotted headscarf that he doesn't like because it makes her look old. "Why don't you go out?"

And it is beautiful outside. Fall on the cusp of evening and the air is cool. The moon and the sun are in the sky together and he can guess where Cassiopaea and Ursa Minor will be once the tawny desert gold of sunset wears into black. A lot down there's an abandoned gas station where the kids pick blackberries and the girls smack their purple lips with wicked relish when they see him watching, and that's... all different kinds of sweet.

But he shakes his head over it regretfully, because if he doesn't make this revision plan and complete the card index of books he has to read and annotate for his finals he's not going to get through and that doesn't bear thinking about.

"You know, if your heart is set on the military, the army would take you without all of this..." she waves a calloused hand at his textbooks. "All this. I just worry that you're setting yourself up for disappointment, trying to do something you're not..."

"I don't want to be in the army, mom. I want to be a pilot. They don't let you in without good grades."

"It's very hard to be a pilot, sweetheart. What if you're just not..."

Not good enough _is what she wants to say. He knows that because he's not stupid. It's not what you want to hear from your own mother but hey, no point in getting upset, right? It doesn't matter what anyone thinks as long as he finally arrives where he wants to go. He's prepared to knuckle down and work hard and keep proving himself for as long as it takes._

~

_He's in a grey field that stretches out to the horizon on every side, and he's swallowing stones. They aren't large stones - they fit in the cup of the palm of his hand. They taste of dirt. After a while, the first ten or so, it doesn't hurt any more, but the weight of them inside is… it's not unbearable, yet, but he knows it's going to be. Soon the mass of them will be more than he can contain and it will tear through, and then he'll fall. He'll fall forever because this abyss has no end to it. You can always slide further down._

__"_You're not the man for the job Colonel. Everyone can see it."_

~

Rush awoke tireder than ever. Scratching meditatively at his stubble, he stared up at the ceiling, unwilling to pick again at his paradigms in fear that they would all unravel like a safety net and he would fall through. After profound reflection, one thing was clear enough. At present, he utterly despised his life. He had probably better get up and get on with some work.


End file.
